Does Doctors Without Borders Deserve an Independent Probe?

The October 3 airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, carried out by the US, left 42 civilians dead and thousands of Afghans without access to emergency medical care.

The United States — often first in line to call for independent investigations of the actions of others — is blocking efforts to mount an international inquiry into the devastating raid.

Debris litters the floor in one of the corridors of MSF’s Kunduz Trauma center. Photo credit: Victor J. Blue / MSF

Exhibit A of the US double-standard on accountability: the Obama administration’s reaction to the July 2014 downing of a Malaysian airliner over territory controlled by “Russian-backed separatists” in eastern Ukraine.

Referring to that tragedy, President Obama said, “[A]mid our prayers and our outrage, the United States continues to do everything in our power to help bring home their loved ones, support the international investigation, and make sure justice is done.” He also condemned the “separatists” for interfering with the crash investigation and tampering with evidence.

But that was when the Russians and their allies were the suspects. In the wake of the Afghan hospital bombing, the US has insisted it has the ability to investigate itself impartially, a claim Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF) strongly rejects.

“Very Precisely Hit”

Supporting the MSF position is the fact that the official US story has changed numerous times. US forces first claimed the airstrike was carried out “against individuals threatening the force,” and that the nearby hospital was only collateral damage.

In response, MSF said “the main hospital building, where medical personnel were caring for patients, was repeatedly and very precisely hit during each aerial raid, while the rest of the compound was left mostly untouched,” suggesting the strikes were not a mistake.

Local Afghan forces attempted to justify the attack on grounds that Taliban fighters shot at US and Afghan forces from the hospital.

The MSF categorically denies this, saying that the Afghan statement “amounts to an admission of a war crime.” Hospitals are protected under laws of war.

The differing accounts of what happened that day only underscore the need for an independent, impartial body to conduct an investigation.

“Violations of the Rules of War?”

The US military completed its internal investigation in November. In contrast to earlier US statements, the latest report does not claim the bombing of the hospital was collateral damage inflicted while protecting US troops under fire from the Taliban. Instead, the report says that US forces intended to strike a nearby building where they believed insurgents were taking shelter, but that “human error, compounded by systems and procedural failures“ resulted in US forces striking the MSF compound instead. The communications systems malfunctioned, and personnel requesting and executing the strike “did not undertake the appropriate measures to verify that the facility was a legitimate military target,” said General John Campbell.

But MSF is not satisfied. Christopher Stokes, the organization’s General Director, said in a written statement dated November 25, “the US version of events presented today leaves MSF with more questions than answers. The frightening catalogue of errors outlined today illustrates gross negligence on the part of US forces and violations of the rules of war.”

MSF has called on the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission to launch an independent investigation. The IHFFC was established under the Geneva Conventions but has never been used since it was officially constituted in 1991. According to the group’s website, “The IHFFC stands ready to undertake an investigation but can only do so based on the consent of the concerned… States.”

However, the United States and Afghanistan are unlikely to give their consent, as they would prefer their own investigation to be accepted as definitive.

Doctors WIthout Borders condemns this stance in the strongest possible language.“We cannot rely solely on the parties involved in the conflict to carry out an independent and impartial examination of an attack in which they are implicated,” said MSF-USA Executive Director Jason Cone. “Perpetrators cannot also be judges.”

In the New American Century, the concept of ‘human rights’ has become a relative concept.

US and international media have been abuzz in recent days with the ongoing armed occupation at the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.  The social media space has been, quite predictably, polarized with many on the far right lionizing the armed occupiers as “patriots” and “heroes” defending a just cause in the name of “liberty.” 

Naturally many liberals and assorted leftists have condemned the occupation, pointing out both the relevant legal and historical issues at play here, including the vicious tradition of white militias in the US, the blatant disregard of environmental regulations, and much more that is well beyond the scope of this article.

But what has been missed by seemingly every pundit, left and right, who has chimed in on the Oregon occupation is the unmistakable stench of provocation.  Simply put, something is off about this whole story, and it struck me from the first moment I read about what was happening, who was involved, and who wasn’t involved.  Specifically, there are indications that this entire fiasco has been manufactured by either government agencies themselves or some other private forces for any number of reasons.

If this sounds like “conspiracy theory” to you, it should; I am here theorizing about a potential conspiracy[studio audience gasps].  While the media, academia, and other assorted handmaidens of the ruling class have conditioned many on the Left to recoil in horror at the mere mention of the word, the fact remains that conspiracies are everywhere, that the government and corporations are involved in them, and that refusing to question received narratives and facts for fear of being tarred and feathered as a “conspiracy nut” is precisely the sort of mindless twaddle that has become all too pervasive on the Left.

And so, armed with my bullshit detector, and with full knowledge that many potential angry emailers have already stopped reading, I now dive into the morass that is the #OregonOccupation.

Questions about the Key Players

While much can be said about Ammon Bundy, the son of Nevada rancher (and well known racist) Cliven Bundy, the real suspicion lies with three of the “activists” widely regarded as instrumental in organizing the occupation.  By examining what is known and unknown about these three shady characters, a much different picture begins to emerge, one in which a publicity stunt-cum-armed occupation is less an act of protest, and more an act of provocation.

First up for scrutiny is Ryan Payne, an Army veteran and one of the spokespeople for the occupiers both in Oregon, and during the 2014 standoff at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada.  Speaking of the ongoing Oregon occupation, Payne told the New York Times, “We will be here for as long as it takes…People have talked about returning land to the people for a long time. Finally, someone is making an effort in that direction.”  Leaving aside the hilariously wrongheaded idea that public lands can be seized and given over to private landowners, and that that would somehow qualify as “returning land to the people,” it is Payne himself who deserves further investigation.

Payne, who served in the US Army in Iraq from 2003-2005, is described in his Army Commendation Medalcertificate as having performed “exceptionally meritorious service as a long range surveillance senior scout observer and assistance team leader” while being part of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion.  It strikes me as curious, if not completely suspicious, that a young white veteran of military intelligence happens to have been part of both the Bundy Ranch standoff and the ongoing occupation in Oregon.  But maybe I’m just paranoid, right?  Maybe he’s just some right wing young veteran with an overzealous desire to effect political change.  Well, maybe.  But when you consider that this nobody from Nowhere, Montana has become one of the main participants of these two actions in Nevada and Oregon, and that he’s been at the center of nearly every aspect of both incidents, it should certainly raise some questions.

But don’t take it from me.  Gary Hunt, a right wing, pro-militia blogger writing at Canada Free Press, had this to say about Payne, “[Payne provided] ‘meritorious service’ at Bunkerville[the Bundy Ranch standoff in 2014], holding the chaotic mass of militia and molding them into a cohesive force.” That certainly does not sound like some Johnny-come-lately just trying to be part of some cool anti-government action.  Instead, that sounds like an intelligence operator, someone coordinating actions and groups and maintaining operational security, among other responsibilities.  In short, Payne appears from all indications to be a focal point of both episodes.

However, “molding the militia into a cohesive force” was not Payne’s only contribution to the 2014 standoff.  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center report entitled War in the West:

After watching the [viral Cliven Bundy] video from his home in Anaconda, Montana, 650 miles away, Ryan Payne, 30, an electrician and former soldier who had deployed twice to the Iraq war, became enraged […] Payne left that day with another member of his militia, Jim Lardy, and drove through the night, a few sleeping bags in tow, burning up cell phones hoping to bring every militia member they could. On April 9 he sent out an urgent call for the militias to mobilize. ‘At this time we have approximately 150 responding, but that number is growing by the hour,’…Militia snipers lined the hilltops and overpasses with scopes trained on federal agents. What happened was not unplanned. As Payne later told the SPLC, he had ordered certain gunmen [sic] ‘to put in counter sniper positions’ and others to hang behind at the rance [sic]. ‘[M]e and Mel Bundy put together the plan for the cohesion between the the Bundys and the militia…. Sending half of the guys up to support the protestors…and keep overwatch and make sure that if the BLM wanted to get froggy, that it wouldn’t be good for them.’

According to Payne’s own words, and those of his supporters, there is certainly ample reason to suspect that this 30 year old veteran was more than simply a participant in this saga, but that he was one of the principal organizers of nearly every aspect of the event, from recruitment and media penetration to operational control.  Payne’s message to his fellow right wing militia brothers certainly has the air of provocation as he suggests that they be prepared to lay down their lives in armed struggle against the federal government. “All men are mortal, most pass simply because it is their time, a few however are blessed with the opportunity to choose their time in performance of duty,” Payne explained in a thinly veiled threat of potentially lethal violence.

As I adjust my tinfoil hat, allow me to suggest that such words as those uttered by Payne reek of the tactics ofagents provocateurs whose objective it is to incite violence in order to either discredit a particular targeted group or to effect a confrontation designed to escalate a given conflict.  While impossible to say definitively, it seems just based on his words and deeds, that Payne has become what amounts to a coordinator of the militia movement.  Whether he is still working for military intelligence, some other intelligence or law enforcement agency, or the FBI, it seems clear that Payne deserves far more scrutiny than the controlled corporate media has given him.

Interestingly, The Oregonian reported the following:

Among those joining Bundy in the occupation are Ryan Payne, U.S. Army veteran, and Blaine Cooper. Payne has claimed to have helped organize militia snipers to target federal agents in a standoff last year in Nevada. He told one news organization the federal agents would have been killed had they made the wrong move.  He has been a steady presence in Burns in recent weeks, questioning people who were critical of the militia’s presence. He typically had a holstered sidearm as he moved around the community.

So not only is Payne one of the main coordinators and organizers of the occupation, he seems to also be doing double duty, acting as a liaison while obviously gathering intelligence about the participants, the non-participants, critical voices in the community, etc.  Again, one could say he’s just a zealous right winger trying to help a cause.  But when you combine the various threads of evidence about his background and his activities, my suspicions are certainly raised.  It seems I’m not alone, as many commenters on right wing blogs use phrases like “plant” and “Fed shill” and “agent” when describing Payne.  According to sources involved in the Bundy Ranch standoff, some were even accusing Payne of precisely that from the very beginning.

Then there is the man known as Blaine Cooper (given name Stanley Hicks) who poses on his Facebook page in military fatigues with sniper rifles and a veritable potpourri of other weapons claiming to be a “patriot” defending the rights of citizens.  Cooper aka Hicks enlisted in the Marines in the Delayed Entry Program which allows prospective soldiers a year before they have to report to boot camp.  However, according to US Marine Corps records, Cooper/Hicks never showed up.  This failure to honor his signed commitment, coupled with more than a dozen arrests and convictions under the name Stanley Hicks, might account for why he changed his name to Cooper and reinvented himself as a self-styled militia leader.

Cooper/Hicks is well known on YouTube within right wing militia circles, with tens of thousands of views of his various

.  He has also falsely presented himself as a member of the Oath Keepers, another militia organization that has featured prominently in various exploits, including their much maligned visible presence in Ferguson, Missouri at the height of the protests over the murder of Mike Brown.  Here is what Stewart Rhodes, a founder and President of the Oath Keepers had to say about Cooper/Hicks

(see also 15:01   OathKeepersOK  01 Jan 2016 Views: 9 k

Actually, he [Cooper/Hicks] has never been a member of Oath Keepers. Being a felon, he is automatically disqualified and inelligible [sic] for membership in our org, nor has he ever tried to join. He has paraded around in an Oath Keepers T shirt, and misrepresented himself as being onr [sic] of us, and has used our logo without our permission in some of his idiotic crap he has done. He is a loose cannon retard and blow-hard…But he is not an Oath Keeper.

Interestingly, the Oath Keepers, along with a number of other militia organizations, have been quick to distance themselves from the Burns, Oregon occupation, and from the likes of Payne and Cooper. According to astatement on the Oath Keepers website, the organization disavows the actions of Payne, Cooper & Co., making clear that “In the Hammond case, there is no clear and present danger of the family being mass murdered, there is no stand off [sic], and the family has no intent of starting one … If you want to go protest, by all means do so … but do not allow yourselves to be roped into an armed stand off [sic] the Hammonds do not want.”

Similarly, the Oregon chapter of the Three Percenters, another right wing militia organization, released astatement on their Facebook page in which they explained that:

Unbeknownst to the Idaho 3%, Oregon 3%, it’s [sic] leaders, associations, rally participants, or the citizens of Harney County; these actions were premeditated and carried out by a small group of persons who chose to carry out this takeover after the rally [emphasis added]. The 3% of Idaho, 3% of Oregon, The Oregon Constitutional Guard, and PPN organizations in no way condone nor support these actions. They do not mirror our vision, mission statement, or views in regards to upholding the Constitution, The Rule of Law, or Due Process.

(Also, check out this  from Cooper and read the comments which, aside from the standard anti-semitic nonsense, are littered with commenters accusing Cooper of being a liar, a plant, a provocateur, an agent.)

Such strongly worded disavowals and condemnations indicate that Payne, Cooper, and their cohort are manufacturing this incident entirely.  Whether or not the disagreement between the militias and the occupiers is purely a matter of tactics, or something more deeply rooted, including suspicions about the motives and connections of Payne and Cooper, this is a question for those involved in these groups.  At the very least however, it seems that segments of the right wing militia movement are not exactly embracing these actions.

Finally we come to the loathsome buffoon Jon Ritzhemier.  If that name rings a bell, it should; Ritzheimer was the organizer and sponsor of the “Draw Muhammad” contest in Phoenix, Arizona which made national headlines.  One important aspect of the protest outside a Phoenix area mosque which coincided with the contest was the fact that Ritzheimer was deliberately provoking both the Muslim community and the hardcore right wingers who participated in the protest.  Ritzheimer described the rally as being “about pushing out the truth about Islam.”  However, according to the event’s Facebook page (since deleted but quoted by theWashington Times), “This will be a PEACEFUL protest in front of the Islamic Community Center in Phoenix AZ… Everyone is encouraged to bring American flags and any message that you would like to send to the known acquaintances of the 2 gunmen…People are also encouraged to utilize their second amendment right at this event just in case our first amendment right comes under the much anticipated attack.”

While Ritzheimer talked up his event as a “peaceful protest,” it’s quite clear that there was a not so subtle implied threat of violence, just as there was at Bunkerville, just as there is in Burns, Oregon today.  The salient point is not that these are gun-toting lunatics, but rather that they are being lured into a potentially dangerous and violent confrontation by an individual whose intentions are suspect to say the least.

A further indication that Ritzheimer’s objective is provocation rather than protest is his outlandishly stupid, and incredibly irresponsible, “roadtrip” to New York where he planned to confront the Muslims of America organization which had referred to him as the “American Taliban.”  What is particularly interesting is that Ritzheimer was in communication with the FBI throughout the trip until he allegedly cut off communication.   How does an allegedly anti-government right wing activist spend hours talking on the phone with Federal agents?  Perhaps, as some are likely to say, I’m reading too much into this.  Well, the right wing militia types who have been suggesting that Ritzheimer is a provocateur might also be “reading too much into this.”

The question of motive is obviously front and center when considering the potential that the entire Oregon Occupation is being staged.  Why would the handlers of these potential agents provocateurs want to do this?  Here are some, but certainly not all, of the possible motives:

1. Create a situation that is likely to escalate in order to then use it to justify everything from increasingly draconian anti-terror legislation (especially “domestic” terrorism) to potential dragnet policing of the radical fringes on both left and right. Nothing would justify a crackdown on radical environmentalists, armed self-defense organizations (be they Oath Keepers or the Huey P. Newton Gun Club), revolutionary communists and anarchists, and other such groups better than a nice, messy, dramatic event in Oregon.
2. Use this event, and others like it, as a means of discrediting, dividing, and factionalizing not merely the right wing organizations, but all groups who see corporations and the State as the enemy. As communist writer and journalist Harriet Parsons correctly wrote in 1980:

The state’s tactics fall into two broad categories, spying and provocation… The government boasts that over 87% of the information on revolutionaries collected by the state comes from informants, members of organizations solicited by the police or people placed within a group to gather information. Once in the organization, the informants worm their way into key positions in order to have access to critical information about the leadership and tactical plans… In some cases, agents within will try to push the line of the organization to an incorrect position on the right or left so as to discredit the Party’s work among the masses… Excellent examples of this technique can be seen in the government’s disruption of the mass organizations engaged in the anti-war movement in the 1960s… FBI agents often offered to supply dynamite and weapons to the radicals to encourage terrorist action which would raise public sentiment against them and make them vulnerable to legal prosecution.

3. Manufacture some sort of heroism or martyrdom on the part of the occupiers in order to promote right wing extremist ideology which will appeal to an increasing segment of the population, particularly in light of recent developments ranging from the ascendance of Trumpism to the ongoing economic breakdown of the middle class. In doing so, the ruling class then ‘lances the boil’ of activism and revolutionary energies, directing them to fascistic, nationalistic dead ends rather than to a genuine mass movement centered on the rights of working people and the poor.  In other words, social engineering.

Naturally there are likely many other possible motives for manufacturing the sort of fiasco that is unfolding in Burns, Oregon.  Whatever the true motives, one thing is clear: what’s happening in Oregon is dangerous, unproductive, and dare I say, counter-revolutionary.

I should note that, as if it weren’t already plainly obvious, I’m not a supporter of right wing militia groups in the US, though I do share some of their concerns in regards to the police state and the corporate entity called the US Government. Nor am I a fan of that nebulous thing called the “Patriot Movement,” riddled as it is with anarcho-capitalist claptrap, radical libertarian pseudo-politics, racism, xenophobia, and outright fascism.

However, that aside, it is important to separate what’s real from what’s manufactured.  There are real people with real grievances and a genuine desire to roll back the fascist police state in this movement.  It is precisely such activists who are the REAL target of the Oregon occupation, and along with them, so too are any radical activists who want to use direct action to effect change.

While many on the left and right are mesmerized by Bernie and Trump and the non-revolutionary “revolutions” they represent, the ruling class knows perfectly well that true revolution will come from below.  Oregon might just be yet another effort to cut the legs out from under it.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly attributed a quotation to a journalist.  It has has since been removed, and a formal apology issued to the journalist. 

Saudi Arabia is a beheading paradise. But this PR nightmare is the least of all problems in an oil crisis. Once again, the heart of the matter is – what else – black gold.

So far, the House of Saud’s whole energy strategy has boiled down to shaving off its oil production no matter what it takes, even issuing bonds to cover its massive deficits.

Now the strategy has been moved one step ahead via a flagrant provocation: the execution of Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr.

The House of Saud believes that by stoking the flames of a Riyadh-Tehran confrontation it may raise the fear factor in the oil supply sphere, leading to higher oil prices (which it needs), while maintaining the Holy Wahhabi Grail of keeping imminent Iranian oil off the market.

From the beginning, Riyadh bet on the possibility of extra energy-related sanctions on Iran in case Tehran forcefully responded to its beheading provocation. Yet Iranians are too sophisticated to fall for such a crude tap.

Persian Gulf traders have confirmed the 2016 Saudi budget is based on an average crude oil price of only $29 per barrel, as first reported by Jadwa Investment in Riyadh.

From the House of Saud’s budget dilemma perspective, this is absolutely unsustainable. The House of Saud is the biggest OPEC oil exporter. Yet their supreme hubris is to deny Iran any leeway in exports, which will be inevitable especially in the second half of 2016. Moreover, the low oil price strategy doesn’t apply solely to Iran: it’s still part of the oil war against Russia.

Somebody though is not doing the math right in Riyadh. The Saudi low oil price strategy has been punishing Russia – the number two global oil producer – badly. The Saudis cannot possibly expect that their beheading provocation will simultaneously scotch an OPEC-Russia deal on cutting production and also lead to higher oil prices, which would mostly benefit – guess what – Iran and Russia.

Six months to destroy Russia

A case can be made that the House of Saud’s low oil price strategy has been a slow motion Wahhabi hara-kiri from the start (which, by the way, is hardly a bad thing.)

The House of Saud budget has collapsed. Riyadh is financing an unwinnable, mightily expensive war on Yemen, financing and weaponizing all manner of Salafi-jihadists in Syria, and is spending fortunes to prop up al-Sisi in Egypt against any possible Daesh (Islamic State) and/or Muslim Brotherhood offensive. As if this were not enough, internally the succession is a royal mess, with King Salman’s 30-year-old warrior-in-chief, Mohammad bin Salman, stamping his toxic mix of arrogance and incompetence on a daily basis.

Predictably, Riyadh once again is following Washington’s orders.

The United States government is frantically trying to hold the oil price down to destroy the Russian economy, using their proxy Persian Gulf producers who are pumping all out. That amounts to no less than seven million barrels a day over the OPEC quota, according to Persian Gulf traders. The US government believes it can destroy the Russian economy – again – as if the clock had been turned back to 1985, when the global glut was 20 percent of the oil supply and the Soviet Union was bogged down in Afghanistan and internally bleeding to death.

Oil went down to $7.00 a barrel in 1985, and that low figure is where the US government is now trying to drive the price down. Yet today the global glut is less than three percent of the oil supply, not 20 percent as in 1985.

The surplus today is only 2.2 million barrels a day, according to Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. Iran will bring on initially around 600,000 barrels a day of new oil in 2016. That means later this year we will have a 2.8-million potential surplus.

The problem is, according to Persian Gulf traders, an annual oil depletion of seven million barrels a day, and that cannot be replaced with the collapse in drilling. What this means is that all surplus oil could be wiped out in the first or second quarters of 2016. By mid-2016, oil prices should start surging dramatically, even with additional oil from Iran.

So the US government strategy has now metastasized into trying to destroy the Russian economy before the oil price inevitably recovers. That would give the US government a window of opportunity spanning only the next six months.

How this could have been pulled off so far is a testament, once again, to the irresistible force of Wall Street manipulators using cash settlement; they are able to create a crash where there is hardly any surplus oil at all. Yet even as the Empire of Chaos frantically manipulates the oil price down, it may not go down fast enough to destroy the Russian economy.

Even Reuters was forced to admit briefly the oil surplus was less than two million barrels a day, and may even be alarmingly less than a million barrels a day before returning to the usual oil-at-an-all-time-low story. This information on the real oil surplus so far had been completely censored. It confronts head on the hegemonic US narrative of surpluses lasting forever and the imminent collapse of the Russian economy.

As for Saudi Arabia, it’s just a mere pawn in a much nastier game. Common sense now rules that it’s essentially a matter of Black Daesh (the fake “Caliphate”) and White Daesh (the House of Saud). After all, the ideological matrix is the same, beheadings included. It’s the next stage of the oil war that may well decide which Daesh will be the first to fall.

Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia Times Online. Born in Brazil, he’s been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Even before 9/11 he specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central and East Asia, with an emphasis on Big Power geopolitics and energy wars. He is the author of “Globalistan” (2007), “Red Zone Blues” (2007), “Obama does Globalistan” (2009) and “Empire of Chaos” (2014), all published by Nimble Books. His latest book is “2030”, also by Nimble Books, out in December 2015.

*CHINA STOCKS HALTED FOR REST OF DAY AFTER CSI 300 TUMBLES 7%

 

Happy New Year…

 

Chinese traders are unhappy:

• Circuit breaker may be triggering “herd effect” and intensifying panic, investors may accelerate selling after 1st trading halt as they seek liquidity: Galaxy Sec. strategist Sun Jianbo
• “There seems to be considerable anxiety in the mkt with investors selling as a preventive measure,” Shenwan Hongyuan Group director Gerry Alfonso
• Investor confidence is on “shaky ground” due to negative factors incl. sharp depreciation in yuan, oil price slump and overnight losses in overseas equity mkts: Central China Sec. strategist Zhang Gang
• Threshold being hit too easily in China, adding “liquidity fears” in mkt: Catherine Cheung, Head of Investment Strategy & Portfolio Advisory at Citibank Global Consumer Banking

Crude crashes to a $32 Handle…

 

Gold just surged to $1100…

 

The entire Chinese stock market has been halted on half the trading days in 2016

The punishment will continue until The Fed unleashes QE4!!

*  *  *

*CHINA STOCK SLUMP TRIGGERS TRADING HALT AS CSI 300 FALLS 5%

 

US Equity markets are tumbling…

 

And USDJPY is in free-fall…

 

Someone just stepped into support the Offshore Yuan…

 

As we detailed earlier:

Following the collapse of offshore Yuan to 5 year lows and decompression to record spreads to onshore Yuan, The PBOC has stepped in and dramatically devalued the Yuan fix by 0.5% to 6.5646. This is the biggest devaluation since the August collapse. Offshore Yuan has erased what modest bounce gains it achieved intraday and is heading significantly lower once again. Dow futures are down 100 points on the news.

PBOC fixes Yuan at its weakest since March 2011… with the biggest devaluation since August

 

And Offshore Yuan collapses…

 

This all has a worrisome sense of deja vu all over again… We have seen this pattern of money flow chaos before… Outflows surge from China, send liquidity needs spiking, which bleeds over into Saudi stress (petrodollar?), causing unwinds in major equity markets (thanks to deleveraging of carry trades) in China and then US stocks…

Chinese stocks are opening down hard:

• *SHANGHAI COMPOSITE INDEX FALLS 4.01%
• *SHANGHAI COMPOSITE EXTENDS DROP TO 10% BELOW DECEMBER HIGH
• *HANG SENG CHINA ENTERPRISES INDEX FALLS 3.03%
• *CHINA CSI 300 INDEX FALLS 4.05%

 

 

Hold your breath. Dow futures plunged 100 points on the news…

Did you see what just happened in China?  For the second time in four days, a massive stock market crash has caused an emergency shutdown of the markets in China. 

On both Monday and Thursday, trading was suspended for 15 minutes when the CSI 300 fell 5 percent, and on both days the total decline very rapidly escalated to 7 percent once trading was reopened.  Once a 7 percent drop happens, trading is automatically suspended for the rest of the day.  I guess that is one way to keep the stock market from crashing – you just don’t let anyone trade.  And of course the panic in China is causing other markets to go haywire as well.  As I write this, the Nikkei is down 324 points and Hong Kong is down 572 points.

The amazing thing is that trading was only open in China for about 15 total minutes tonight.  Here is how CNBC described what just happened…

China’s stocks were suspended from all trade on Thursday after the CSI300 tumbled more than 7 percent in early trade, triggering the market’s circuit breaker for a second time this week.

That drop-kicked stock markets across Asia, which were already wallowing after a weaker open amid concerns over China’s economic slowdown and its depreciating currency as well as falling oil prices.

On the mainland, the Shanghai Composite tumbled 7.32 percent by at the time of the halt, while the Shenzhen Composite plummeted 8.34 percent. The CSI300, the benchmark index against which China’s new circuit breakers are set, plunged 7.21 percent. If that index rises or falls 5 percent, the market halts all trade for 15 minutes. If it moves 7 percent, trading will be suspended for the rest of the day. In total Thursday, China shares only traded around 15 minutes.

How will European and U.S. markets respond to the chaos in Asia when they open?

That is a very good question.  I think that everybody will be watching.

Already, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down about 500 points for the year.  The financial crisis that began in the second half of 2015 is now accelerating as we enter 2016, and nobody is quite sure what is going to happen next.

One key to watch is what happens with the S&P 500.

2000 is kind of like a giant line in the sand on the S&P 500.  On Wednesday we saw the market hover around that psychologically-important number, and there is a whole lot of resistance right there.  If we break solidly through 2000 and start plunging toward 1900, that is going to break things wide open.

The primary reason for the stock market crash in China on Thursday was another stunning devaluation of the yuan.  This explanation from Zero Hedge is very helpful…

Following the collapse of offshore Yuan to 5 year lows and decompression to record spreads to onshore Yuan, The PBOC has stepped in and dramatically devalued the Yuan fix by 0.5% to 6.5646. This is the biggest devaluation since the August collapse. Offshore Yuan has erased what modest bounce gains it achieved intraday and is heading significantly lower once again. Dow futures are down 100 points on the news.

PBOC fixes Yuan at its weakest since March 2011… with the biggest devaluation since August

A massive devaluation of the yuan was also one of the primary reasons for the market turmoil that we saw back in August.  The Chinese are playing games with their currency, and this is causing havoc in the global marketplace.

Meanwhile, we have received some other very troubling news about the global economy over the past few days…

-The price of oil continues to collapse.  As I write this, the price of U.S. oil is down to $33.26 a barrel.  Those that follow my writing regularly already know that this is a really bad sign for the global economy.

-The Baltic Dry Index just hit another brand new all-time record low.  Global trade is absolutely imploding, and this is having a devastating impact on China and other major exporting nations.

-U.S. manufacturing is contracting at the fastest pace that we have seen since the last recession.  This is precisely what we would expect to see during the early stages of a new crisis.

-U.S. manufacturing imports are also contracting at the fastest pace that we have seen since the last recession.  It appears that “the almighty U.S. consumer” is not going to save the global economy after all.

In 2015, trillions of dollars of stock market wealth was wiped out globally.  Now this new global financial crisis is picking up speed, and many of the “experts” seem absolutely stunned by what is happening.

But most of my readers are not surprised.  That is because I have been breaking down the signs that have been warning us of this new crisis in excruciating detail for months.  The financial carnage that we have witnessed around the globe this week is simply a logical progression of what has already been happening.

To be honest, though, even I have been stunned by what has happened in China this week.  I can’t say that I expected an emergency shutdown of the Chinese markets two times within the first four trading days of the year.

Panic and fear are beginning to grip the global marketplace, and once that starts to happen events become very difficult to predict.

Let us hope that things settle down soon, but I wouldn’t count on it.

As I have said before, 2016 is the year when everything changes, and we are going to see things take place over the next 12 months that are going to shock the world.

Image: Donald Trump in Qatar

Mr. Trump, I am an American of Christian Arab background who grew up in Jesus’ home town of Nazareth.

I attended Catholic and Orthodox schools all my life. In fact, it was Lubbock Christian University in Texas that attracted me to immigrate to the United States.

Christmas has always been an important holiday for me, not only as a marker for my religion, but also as an opportunity to reflect on my life, as it’s been shaped by love and friendships.

This Christmas, Mr. Trump, I found that my reflection oddly involved you. You see, those friendships have been defined in many ways by the people you seemingly like to vilify: Muslims.

But I’m writing to tell you that the Muslims you’ve been portraying — the fears you’ve been stoking as you paint a religion with a disturbingly large brush — stand in far contrast to the Muslims I’ve been blessed to meet throughout my life.

So let me briefly tell you about the Muslims I know.

The Muslims I know showered my family with gifts and boxes of produce every Christmas—all to be sure that our family of nine children was well fed and happy.

The Muslims I know always told me “not to worry” as they (shopkeepers)  bagged and handed me the items I needed, despite being short on cash.

The Muslims I know took off whatever they were wearing and handed it to me, should I have happened to tell them that I admired it.

The Muslims I know donated their time, money, and efforts to provide clothing to the needy and feed poor, Christian families.

The Muslims I know rushed to my rescue when I had car trouble, or simply needed a ride.

The Muslims I know said “follow me” whenever I asked them for directions, always choosing to show me the way.

The Muslims I know didn’t only call me a “sister”…they treated me like one.

Perhaps if you knew those Muslims, Mr. Trump, you would never judge more than a billion followers of a religion based solely on the actions of a few.

So as we begin yet another year, I’d like to challenge you to a resolution. Resolve to end these blanket generalizations, and instead, stop and think about the Muslims you personally know, the ones you have surely met through your countless business interactions, both in the Middle East and here at home.

Think about them as individuals, and let them be defined by their good deeds.

After all, that is what Christianity asks of us.

Amal David, Ph.D.

Dr. Amal David is Director of Community Outreach at Arab America

www.arabamerica.com/53028-2/

This article was originally published in February 2014

In two recent articles we explained the hows and whys of gold price manipulation. The manipulations are becoming more and more blatant. On February 6 the prices of gold and stock market futures were simultaneously manipulated.

On several recent occasions gold has attempted to push through the $1,270 per ounce price. If the gold price rises beyond this level, it would trigger a flood of short-covering by the hedge funds who are “piggy-backing” on the bullion banks’ manipulation of gold. The purchases by the hedge funds in order to cover their short positions would drive the gold price higher.

With pressure being exerted by tight supplies of physical gold bars available for delivery to China, the Fed is growing more desperate to keep a lid on the price of gold. The recent large decline in the stock market threatened the Fed’s policy of taking pressure off the dollar by cutting back bond purchases and reducing the amount of debt monetization.

Thursday, February 6, provided a clear picture of how the Fed protects its policy by manipulating the gold and stock markets. Gold started to move higher the night before as the Asian markets opened for trading. Gold rose steadily from $1254 up to a high of $1267 per ounce right after the Comex opened (8:20 a.m. NY time). The spike up at the open of the Comex reflected a rush of short-covering, and the stock market futures looked like they were about to turn negative on the day. However, starting at 8:50 a.m., here’s what happened with Comex futures and S&P 500 stock futures:

 ^[1]

At 8:50 a.m. NY time (the graph time-scale is Denver time), 3,225 contracts hit the Comex floor. During the course of the previous 14 hours and 50 minutes of trading, about 76,000 total April contracts had traded (Globex computer system + Comex floor), less than an average of 85 contracts per minute. The 3,225 futures contracts sold in one minute caused a $15 dollar decline in the price of gold. At the same time, the stock market futures mysteriously spiked higher:

 ^[2]

As you can see from the graphs, gold was forced lower while the stock market futures were forced higher. There was no apparent news or market events that would have triggered this type of reaction in either the gold or stock market. If anything, the trade deficit report, which showed a higher than expected trade deficit for December, should have been mildly bullish for gold and bearish for the stock market. Furthermore, at the same time that gold was being forced lower on the Comex, the U.S. dollar index experienced a sharp drop in price and traded below the 81 level of support. The fall in the dollar is normally bullish for gold.

The economy is getting weaker. Fed policy is obviously failing despite recent official pronouncements that the economy is improving and that Bernanke’s monetary policies succeeded. A just published study by Jing Cynthia Wu and Fan Dora Zia concludes that the the positive impact of the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing is so slight as to be insignificant. The multi-trillion dollar expansion in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet lowered the unemployment rate by little more than two-tenths of one percent, raised the industrial production index by 2 percent, and brought about a mere 34,000 housing starts. http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~faxia/pdfs/JMP.pdf ^[3]

The renewal of the battle over the debt ceiling limit is bullish for gold and bearish for stocks. However, with the ongoing manipulation of the gold price and stock averages via gold and stock market futures, the normal workings of markets that establish true values are disrupted.

A rising problem for the manipulators is that the West is running low on gold available for delivery to China and other Asian buyers. In January China took delivery of a record amount of gold. China has been closed since last Friday in observance of the Chinese New Year. As China resumes purchases, default on delivery moves closer.

One way for the Fed and bullion banks to hold off defaulting on Chinese purchases is to coerce holders of gold futures contracts to settle in cash, not in delivery of gold, by driving down the price during heavy Comex delivery periods. This is what likely occurred on Feb. 6 in addition to the Fed’s routine price maintenance of gold.

As of Thurday’s (Feb. 6) Comex report for Wednesday’s (Feb. 5) close, there were about 616,000 ounces of gold available to be delivered from Comex vaults for February contracts totaling slightly more than 400,000 ounces, of which delivery notices for 100,000 ounces were given last Wednesday night. If the holders of the other 300,000 contracts opt to take delivery instead of cash settlement, February contracts would absorb two-thirds of Comex gold available for delivery.

The Comex gold inventory has been a big source of gold shipments from the West to the East, resulting in a decline of the Comex gold inventory by over 4 million ounces–113 tonnes–during the course of 2013. We know from reports from Swiss bar refiners that the 100 ounce Comex gold bars are being received by these refiners and recast into the kilo bars that the Chinese prefer and shipped to Hong Kong. With the amount of physical gold in Comex vaults rapidly being removed, the Fed/bullion banks use market ambush tactics such as those we describe above to augment and conserve the supply of gold available for delivery.

Readers have asked if gold can continue to be shorted on the Comex once no gold is left for delivery. From what we have seen–the fixing of the LIBOR rate, the London gold price, foreign exchange rates, the price of bonds and the manipulation of gold and stock market futures prices–we don’t know what the limit is to the ability of the Fed, the Treasury, the Plunge Protection Team, the Exchange Stabilization Fund, and the banks to manipulate the markets.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy.  Dave Kranzler traded high yield bonds for Bankers Trust for a decade. As a co-founder and principal of Golden Returns Capital LLC, he manages the Precious Metals Opportunity Fund.

Originally published on May 31, 2013

From economic turmoil to social dissolution and cultural chaos, it can no longer be denied that the once-opulent West is on the brink of collapse.

In his new book, respected economist, author and former Assistant Secretary of  the US Treasury Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, explores the roots of this crisis and where we are going from here.

This is the GRTV Feature Interview with your host, James Corbett, and our special guest, Paul Craig Roberts.

Visit our video archive at Global Research TV

United States legislation promotes emigration from the island, but for nearly a month now, thousands of Cubans attempting to travel to the United States have been blocked in Costa Rica.

Nearly 6,000 Cubans wishing to emigrate to the United States, are stuck in Costa Rica, where they have been denied the opportunity of continuing their journey north. After arriving in Ecuador, the only Latin American country that does not require Cubans to obtain entry visas, they undertook a long journey across the continent, in  order to arrive mainly in Miami. But their passage was brought to a standstill in Costa Rica. Indeed, central American countries, from Nicaragua to Mexico, refuse to permit the migrants, their numbers often riddled with members of criminal networks, to pass through their territory and are asking Washington, the entity primarily responsible for this situation, for a policy response.(1)

Indeed, Cubans who enter the United States illegally are welcomed with open arms, while illegal immigrants from other nations are immediately arrested and deported to their countries of origin. This selectivity results from the United States’s historical commitment to the use of migration as a weapon to undermine the Cuban Revolution.(2)

In 1959, the United States began demonstrating its hostility toward the government of Fidel Castro. It opened its doors to the heirs of the former military regime of Fulgencio Batista, including security forces that had been involved in violent and bloody crimes. Washington also welcomed the country’s economic elite and encouraged the departure of highly qualified personnel in an effort to destabilize the society.

The impact on Cuba was harsh. Indeed, in such a vital sector as health, nearly half of all Cuban doctors, some 3,000 in total, responded to the U.S. siren song that promised them a better life. This episode plunged the country into a serious health crisis. Other highly skilled professionals were also encouraged by U.S. authorities to leave the island for more lucrative economic opportunities in Florida.(3)

In its war against Cuba, Washington decided to use the migration issue to destabilize the country. In 1966, Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law unique in the world, which states that any Cuban who immigrated to the United States either legally or illegally, peacefully or by force, on January 1, 1959 or later, will automatically obtain the status of permanent resident. After a year and a day, various social benefits accrue (housing, work, medical coverage, etc.) as well as the possibility of obtaining United States citizenship after five years.(4)

This is a great tool for inciting illegal emigration. For nearly 50 years, the richest country in the world has opened its doors to the population of a small poor Third World country with limited resources and victim, moreover, of extremely severe economic sanctions.

Logic suggests that the U.S. embassy in Havana would issue visas to each applicant under this law. This is not, however, the case. On the contrary, Washington severely limits the number of visas granted to Cubans each year in order to stimulate illegal and dangerous emigration and manipulate crises for political ends. Thus, without visas, Cubans wishing to emigrate to the United States must risk their lives on makeshift rafts, while hoping not to be intercepted by the Coast Guard, or make long journeys across the continent at the mercy of human traffickers and criminal gangs of all sorts.

The New York Times has called for the repeal of the Cuban Adjustment Act :

“[…] it is time to do away with the policy, a Cold War relic that is hindering the normalization of relations between Washington and Havana […] This system has been a boon for human smugglers in Latin America and created burdens for countries from Ecuador to Mexico through which they move […] The Obama administration should negotiate a new agreement with the Cuban government that makes orderly immigration the norm […] American officials are at a loss to explain the special treatment for Cubans, which stands in stark contrast to the harsh way the United States typically treats Central Americans, including minors, many of whom are fleeing for their lives.”(5)

Furthermore, for almost 10 years, Washington has also applied a policy designed to plunder Cuba – a country recognized worldwide for the excellence of its health care system – of its doctors. Indeed, in 2006, the Bush administration adopted the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program whose aim it is to encourage the emigration of Cuban medical professionals to the United States by offering them the opportunity to practice medicine there. This program specifically targets the 50,000 or so Cuban doctors and other health personnel who, in order to assist the poor, practice in the rural areas of some 60 Third World countries. President Barack Obama, in power since 2009, has not eliminated this program, despite his statements favoring a normalization of relations with Cuba.(6)

The repeal of the Cuban Adjustment Act and the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program is essential in order to build a peaceful relationship between Cuba and the United States. Washington cannot expect to achieve an entente cordiale with Havana while maintaining hostile laws that endanger the lives of Cuban citizens.

Thus, a year after the historic reconciliation of December 17, 2014, between Cuba and the United States, many points of disagreement remain between the two countries. For example, President Obama, despite his positive statements, has still not made use of all his powers to bring an end to economic sanctions. These sanctions affect the most vulnerable sectors of the Cuban population and constitute the principal obstacle to the development of the island.

Notes

1. El Nuevo Herald, “Presidente de Costa Rica viajará a Cuba en medio de crisis por migrantes”, December 19, 2015.

2. U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Cuban Adjustment Act”, 1996. http://www.uscis.gov/green-card/other-ways-get-green-card/green-card-cuban-native-or-citizen (site consulted December 25, 2015).

3. Elizabeth Newhouse, « Disaster Medicine : U.S. Doctors Examine Cuba’s Approach », Center for International Policy, July 9, 2012. http://www.ciponline.org/research/html/disaster-medicine-us-doctors-examine-cubas-approach (site consulted July 18, 2012).

4. United States Congresse, “Cuban Adjustment Act”, November 2, 1966. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-80/pdf/STATUTE-80-Pg1161.pdf (site consulted December 25, 2015).

5. The New York Times, « A New Cuban Exodus », December 21, 2015.

6. United States Department of State, « Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program », January 26, 2009. http://www.state.gov/p/wha/rls/fs/2009/115414.htm (site consulted December 25, 2015).

Salim Lamrani, original article in French : Washington et la crise migratoire cubaine, 28 of December of 2015

Translated from the French by Larry R. Oberg.

A Doctor of Iberian and Latin American Studies from the Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, Salim Lamrani is a Senior Lecturer at the University of La Réunion, and a journalist specializing in relations between Cuba and the United States.

His new book is Cuba, Parole à la défense !, Paris, Editions Estrella, 2015. (Preface by André Chassaigne).

Contact: [email protected]; [email protected]

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/SalimLamraniOfficiel

First published in August 2015

This fortress built by Nature for her self

Against infection and the hand of war,

….

This precious stone set in a silver sea

…

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…

England, bound in with the triumphant sea,

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege …

 (“Richard 11”,William Shakespeare, 1564-1616.)

Britain’s top “diplomat”, Foreign Office Minister Philip Hammond has accused “marauding” migrants – the desperate, dispossessed, bereaved, orphaned children even, attempting to reach the UK, where many have relatives, contacts or speak the language – of threatening Britain and Europe’s “standard of living.”

In a racist rant he told the BBC: “Europe can’t protect itself and preserve its standard of living and social structure if it has to absorb millions of migrants from Africa.” Ironically, Hammond before becoming an MP was an advisor to the government of Malawi. Since he clearly holds Africa in such contempt, perhaps Malawi should consider asking for a refund.

Hammond spoke just days after Prime Minister David Cameron described those seeking safety and succour not as a humanitarian catastrophe but as “swarms.”

“Swarms” of course refer to crop destroying insects, locusts, and flies that buzz over and infect meat in open-air markets, on sunny days in Europe or swarming on dead animals or humans in the open and wild.

Cameron, vowing to clamp down on migrants, lashed out at France generally and the port of Calais in particular from where many seeking safety attempt to cross the Channel to the UK. He referred to those trying to “escape North Africa”, since Libya – now a failed, lawless state thanks to US, UK and NATO’s illegal overthrow of another legitimate government – has become a hub for those who wish to flee their own particular disaster and cross the Mediterranean to Europe.

As David Shariatmadari has pointed out (1) this disgusting, shaming verbal feeding frenzy has been joined by the media with the Daily Mail writing that: “this tidal wave of migrants could be the biggest threat to Europe since the war”, the Daily Express referring to a migrant “flood” and the BBC using “stream” and also “flood” with its implication of poor helpless Brits drowning, crushed under an uncontrollable tidal wave of terrifying “other beings” which have no place anywhere in Europe’s ordered perfection, let alone in Britain’s “sceptered isle.”

Speaking from Vietnam where he was marauding with a large trade delegation, Cameron vowed a fortress Britain. Borders would be protected, the “problem dealt with at source…” that meant: “trying to stabilize the countries from which they come”, he said with no sense of irony.

The main countries “from which they come” are Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan where UK insurgents have engaged in swarming and destroying and Syria where they are now doing the same. The majority are fleeing our enjoined destruction of infrastructures, homes, social society and human life on a scale that surely qualifies as genocide.

There are also people from Africa, many who had made livings and lives in Libya, fleeing the now failed state and others indeed looking for a better life. However given Britain and other European countries historical colonial plundering of Africa and more recent ongoing carpet bagging of oil, minerals, erasing or making untenable homes, villages, there is surely a duty to attempt to make amends by offering safety with grace and humanity.

And the reality of these “overwhelming” and “inundating” numbers? David Shariatmadari has the figures: “The number of first-time asylum claims lodged with the British authorities between January and March 2015 was 7,335, lower than in Austria, Sweden, France, Italy, Hungary and Germany. That figure represents only 4% of asylum claims across the EU and puts us 17th in the league table of claims per million inhabitants.

If we look further afield, we see countries in the Middle East absorbing far higher numbers of refugees: there are 1.8 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, 1.1 million in Lebanon and 629,000 in Jordan.

Prior to Syria’s Western backed destabilization and ongoing nightmare, Syria between 2003 and 2011 took in tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees, countless of whom have now been forced to flee again, as have their Syrian hosts, neighbours and friends.

We have to deal with the problem at source and that is stopping so many people from travelling across the Mediterranean in search of a better life” said Cameron of people so desperate that they risk – and lose -their lives and savings in conditions defying description, the majority escaping what the UK and whichever of the marauding “coalitions” it had joined have wrought.

Greece, incidentally, bent under the weight of a desperate financial crisis with a population of just over eleven million has had an influx of 124,000 souls this year alone (2.)

A furious friend commented commented: “If Hammond had been in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office during the last war, there would certainly have been no Kindertransport” (the evacuation of Jewish children from Germany) “couldn’t have those ‘marauding’ Jewish people threatening our standard of living. What a monster the man is.

In fact, in spite of the horrendous threat facing the Jewish population of Europe, the UK behaved equally disgracefully then. Having raised the means to send their children to the UK, many of whom never saw their parents again, the UK government of the time demanded that £50 was lodged with them for each child as a guarantee of their ultimate resettlement (3.) Taking 1939 as a starting date, that is the present day equivalent of £3,002.66 (4.)

Today, as super comfortable millionaires, Foreign Secretary Hammond and Prime Minister Cameron spout their racist rants, Leigh Daynes of Doctors of the World writes (5):

I’ve visited the wretched refugee camps in Darfur and I’ve walked around post-earthquake Haiti. But in all my years of working in aid and development, I’ve never been as shocked as the day I met a group of 10-year-old Syrian boys, riddled with scabies, huddled together in a rain-sodden ditch under scraps of tarpaulin.

Alone and afraid, these boys, all orphans, weren’t in Lebanon or Jordan but in a remote field 20 minutes’ drive from Calais, close to a service station where lorries stop.

Right now, migrants in Calais continue to live in diabolical conditions, suffering awful health problems as a result. These include serious skin problems, gangrene, breathing difficulties and severe cases of diarrhoea.

Increasingly we, the charity Doctors of the World, treat patients who have shattered bones after falling from trucks, who have been slashed by razor wire climbing fences or have been beaten up.

That is after they have trecked cross Europe or escaped drowning in the various crossings. In one boat crossing the Mediterranean two hundred people are believed to have perished: “Knife-wielding traffickers sealed migrants in the hull of a boat which sank off Libya, condemning them to drown after slashing or thrashing them depending on their ethnicity, according to survivor testimonies.” (6)

Just a microcosm of the unimaginable misery caused by marauding interventions and mass murder of which Britain’s successive governments can never resist being part of.

As for Hammond and Cameron’s shaming statements, incitement to racial or ethnic hatred is a criminal offence under the 1976 Race Relations Act which includes:

*deliberately provoking hatred of a racial group

*making inflammatory public speeches

*inciting inflammatory rumours about an individual or an ethnic group,   for the purpose of spreading racial discontent.

“Heil Hammond”?

Notes

1. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/10/migration-debate-metaphors-swarms-floods-marauders-migrants
2. http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/08/07/uk-europe-migrants-greece-idUKKCN0QC10S20150807
3. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nazi-germany/kindertransport/
4. http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/Historic-inflation-calculator-value-money-changed-1900.html
5. http://www.doctorsoftheworld.org.uk/blog/entry/gangrene-and-razor-wire-charity-in-calais-is-no-different-to-a-disaster
6. http://iraq-solidarity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/knife-wielding-traffickers-slash-and.html?utm_source=BP_recent

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn never misses an opportunity to strengthen the right wing of his party by his political cowardice and overarching desire for compromise at all costs. His first cabinet reshuffle has proved to be no exception.

Billed by his opponents as a “revenge reshuffle” and by his supporters as an occasion to deal with the most openly disloyal ministers—who have publicly opposed him on key policies such as bombing Syria and renewing the Trident nuclear weapons system—it fell far short.

For 30 hours, beginning Monday and ending early Wednesday morning, Corbyn negotiated—and sought to reach an accommodation with—those he was supposed to be intent on booting out of high office.

Reporters could not believe what was happening as they waited for history’s longest reshuffle to conclude. On Tuesday, Conservative prime minister David Cameron mocked Corbyn in parliament over its duration, and in the end, all that emerged was a rotten compromise.

Supposed number-one target for removal, Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, kept his post. In the December 2 House of Commons debate on Syria, Benn was allowed to speak after Corbyn in making the closing speech for the official opposition and supported bombing. Applauded and cheered on by the Tories, he then led 11 other shadow cabinet members (out of 28) and a total of 66 Labour MPs into the lobby with Cameron—securing him a higher-than-expected majority of 174.

All it took for Benn to keep his post was a worthless assurance that in future he would back Corbyn’s positions in his role as shadow foreign secretary. This is made more ludicrous still because it was Corbyn who gave him the ability to speak for the shadow cabinet in the first place.

Corbyn’s climb-down on Benn was probably viewed by his advisers as a necessary quid pro quo to allow for some more minor political tinkering, especially after 10 shadow cabinet members threatened to resign if he went. In any event, he finally moved Shadow Defence Secretary Maria Eagle to Culture, due to her support for Trident, and got rid of just two of his more vocal critics, Shadow Culture Secretary Michael Dugher, who made way for Eagle, and Shadow Europe Secretary Pat McFadden.

Dugher, a prominent Zionist, has occupied himself almost exclusively with attacking Corbyn and his supporters. McFadden made perhaps the most damaging attack when he asked Cameron in the House of Commons after the Paris terror attacks “to reject the view that sees terrorist acts as always being a response or a reaction to what we in the West do.” The remarks chimed with Tory attempts to cast their opponents as apologists for terrorism, culminating in Cameron’s description of all those who opposed bombing Syria as “terrorist sympathisers.”

Corbyn’s main ally, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, spent Wednesday morning justifying the reshuffle and its supposed merits.

McDonnell said Benn had agreed not to disagree with the leader from the front bench, to which Benn replied that he would be carrying on with his job “exactly as before”.

McDonnell said that Corbyn in fact agreed with McFadden that terrorists were responsible for what they did, whereas McFadden was implying that Corbyn believed there were excuses for terrorism.

Finally, Corbyn had conducted the reshuffle in a consensual way because he “is a very caring and considerate person and he wanted to listen to people’s views. He wanted to be as inclusive as possible in reviewing our performance over the last few months, so literally he’s been bringing people in, taking their advice, talking to them. …”

It was, McDonnell added , “never going to be this hyped-up Night of the Long Knives.”

Indeed, it was not.

The Labour Party right, having emerged largely unscathed, immediately went back on the offensive—beginning with a torrent of statements in support of its freshly minted martyrs, Dugher, McFadden and Eagle, and ending with the resignation in protest by three junior shadow ministers.

Jonathan Reynolds, shadow minister for rail, and Stephen Doughty, shadow foreign office minister, resigned in defence of McFadden. Kevan Jones resigned as a shadow armed forces minister in opposition to the removal of his boss, Maria Eagle, and her replacement by the anti-Trident Emily Thornberry.

McDonnell described the three as members of a “narrow right-wing clique”—a barb that was less than effective given his earlier endorsement of Corbyn’s “caring and considerate” approach to the actual leaders of that clique.

Press commentary was, for the most part, scathing towards Corbyn. Here was yet another test of strength and will, and one that he had failed.

The most determined opponent of Corbyn and defender of the Labour right is the Guardian. In its pages, Michael White could barely contain his glee, describing Dugher as possibly “a formidable lieutenant to whoever it is that emerges as the standard bearer of the post-Corbyn generation of Labour politicians, ones who seek to win elections, not to lead a self-satisfied protest movement.”

For his part, Steve Richards sought to explain Corbyn’s “impotence” as the result of his being “elected on a distinct policy agenda that is opposed by most of his MPs. Does he cast aside his MPs in order to adopt his agenda, or bring them on board and drop some of his deeply held convictions?”

Richards maintains that, to this question, “There are no obvious answers. Every twist and turn since he became leader arises from this bizarre context.”

In fact, the answers are there for all to see.

Corbyn’s supporters in the rank-and-file of the party want nothing more than to see Benn et al. kicked out of the party. Instead, whenever Corbyn has been posed with the choice of standing in defence of the political agenda on which he was popularly elected and coming into conflict with his cabinet or his MPs, he has behaved as a political invertebrate.

He is the archetypal representative of what little remains of the Labour “left”—someone who has spent decades registering his personal protest at Labour’s right-wing policies without this once having any real consequences or impact on his cosseted life in Westminster. Now, having been catapulted into a leadership position by popular demands for a left alternative, Corbyn can no longer hide the fact that his loyalties are first and foremost to the party apparatus he now leads.

Ultimately, this is not a personality question.

Corbyn’s perspective is a false one. He claims that Labour can be transformed, or rather gently persuaded by his “new politics” of consensus building, to function as a political vehicle to defend the interests of working people. It cannot. The political character of Labour as a defender of the interests of big business and British imperialism has been shaped over decades and cannot be altered by the election of a new leader advancing a few minor reforms and making pacifist noises, even when he is backed by an influx of new members.

Rather, the struggle against austerity, militarism and war demands the political mobilisation of the working class in opposition to the Labour Party and the trade unions, which act as the first-line defenders of capitalism and implacable opponents of socialism.

China’s stock market was closed early Thursday for the second time in four days as stocks plunged as soon as it opened. A key index dropped by 5 percent, forcing an automatic 15-minute freeze. When the markets re-opened the losses continued and the market was shut for the day when they hit 7 percent.

The China plunge came after a day of turbulence in European and US markets on Wednesday, prompted by a further drop in oil prices, rising concerns over Chinese growth and financial stability, and worries over emerging market debt. Reports of a North Korean hydrogen bomb test added to the uncertainty.

In the US, the major indexes fell by more than 1 percent, with the Dow and the S&P 500 ending the day below 17,000 and 2,000, respectively. The US share sell-off followed sharp declines in Japan and other parts of Asia, as well across Europe.

The main factor at work is the deepening trend toward recession in the global economy, which is starting to undermine the financial bubble that has been created by the pumping of trillions of dollars into global financial markets by the US Fed and other major central banks.

Market analysts speaking to the American business channel CNBC cited China and signs of a worsening situation globally and in the US. “It’s pretty much the same story. You’ve got China growth problems,” and “the US manufacturing sector seems to be in recession territory,” one commentator said.

Another commented that the “biggest thing affecting markets” is that “we’re coming in with an assumption that the global economy is slowing more” in 2015 than 2016. “We’re worried about China.”

Another analyst told the Los Angeles Times that markets were “trading on fear that Chinese growth is going to collapse and that… lower oil prices are going to lead to a growing number of defaults in the high-yield bond market.”

Those fears have been compounded by the fall in the price of Brent crude to below $35 per barrel for the first time since 2004, while the price of American crude hit its lowest point in seven years. The falling oil price feeds directly into energy markets via energy-based companies and into the high-yield or “junk” bond market, which saw an infusion of cheap money when oil was trading at more than $100 a barrel barely 18 months ago.

The worsening situation in China is evidenced both in the economy and the financial system. Chinese growth is already down to its lowest levels in a quarter of a century, with manufacturing activity experiencing lower growth for five months in a row and exports down for each of the last 15 months. But a new cause for concern appeared on Wednesday with the news that the services sector had experienced its lowest growth for 17 months. The official policy of the Chinese government is that it is making a transition to a more service-based economy.

Chinese stock market and financial turbulence, which rattled world markets in August last year, has also returned. On the first day of trading, markets were automatically shut down following a drop of almost 7 percent, as the date for the lifting of government restrictions on share trading imposed in August approached.

As in the crisis five months ago, there are concerns about the stability of the Chinese currency, the renminbi. It has now reached its lowest point in five years, as the gap between its value in the more tightly controlled domestic market and the offshore market widens to record levels. The offshore value of the renminbi has dropped by more than 2 percent this week, recalling the events of August, when its surprise devaluation sent shock waves through world markets.

In a research note published on Wednesday, Timothy Moe, Goldman Sachs’ chief Asia-Pacific strategist, wrote: “During our investor meetings in December, the most significant risk that investors were worried about was a substantial devaluation of the renminbi.”

The concerns are two-fold: first, that a significant fall in the Chinese currency will lead to devaluations in Asian and other currencies, sending a new wave of deflationary pressures through the world economy, and second, that it will spark an increase in capital outflows from China that could cause major financial problems.

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) has been intervening in financial markets in an effort to limit the fall in the renminbi, running down its global currency reserves. At the same time, the PBoC wants the currency to fall gradually in order to improve China’s trade position.

There are concerns that the situation is getting out of the control of financial authorities. Last August, they changed the method of determining the value of the renminbi by deciding to tie it to the previous day’s close. But on Wednesday, this new rule was broken when the PBoC fixed the rate significantly above the close for Tuesday, prompting concerns that the movement in the daily fix would only increase market volatility.

Financial Times commentator Gavyn Davies noted that the risk of large scale devaluation of the renminbi was “again spooking financial markets, which are firmly convinced that this is a very bad contingency for global risk assets in 2016.” Since the start of the new year, “investors have become much more concerned that a larger devaluation may be in the in works, either through the choice of the Chinese authorities, or because the outflow of private capital is getting out of hand.”

Some were even worried that China could be suffering from “a genuine exchange rate crisis, in which its enormous foreign currency reserves could be quickly drained.”

There are also growing concerns about financial stability in other emerging markets, which the International Monetary Fund has estimated are “over-borrowed” to the tune of $3 trillion. The prevailing conventional wisdom is that such over-indebtedness is not the concern it was in the past because most of it has been concentrated in the corporate rather than the government sector, and therefore the risk of a sovereign debt crisis is reduced.

But doubt has been cast on this reassuring assessment by an article published Wednesday in the Financial Times. It noted that more than $800 billion of sovereign debt was being camouflaged by the use of bonds that offer implicit state backing without always appearing on government balance sheets. The article noted that the stock of these “quasi-sovereign bonds” had risen in the past 12 months “to overtake that of all emerging market sovereign debt by the end of 2015.”

In other words, while the official debt to gross domestic product ratio may appear quite low by global standards for countries such as India, Russia and China, the amount of debt they have to cover in the event of a crisis could be much higher than official figures indicate.

The worsening global economic situation was underscored by a World Bank report issued Wednesday that cut the bank’s growth forecast for the third year in a row. It said larger-than-anticipated contractions in Brazil and Russia, combined with lower growth in the world’s major economies, had caused it to downgrade its growth forecast by 0.4 percentage points to 2.9 percent. While this was up slightly from the downwardly revised estimate of 2.6 percent for 2015, the report presented a gloomy outlook.

The World Bank cut its forecasts for developing countries as a whole by more than 0.5 percentage points and warned that this estimate was made on the basis of a smooth Chinese slowdown, a stabilisation of commodity prices, and only a gradual increase in borrowing costs. “All of these assumptions, however, are subject to substantial downside risks,” it stated.

The bank pointed out that it has now downwardly revised growth in the major developing countries for three years in a row, the first time this has happened since the 1980s, and noted that recoveries in the US and Europe were weaker than expected, while slowing world trade was having an impact.

Summing up the situation, the bank’s chief economist Kaushik Basu said: “There are severe fault lines beneath the surface.”

Tehran accused Riyadh of conducting an airstrike on the Iranian embassy in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa.

On January 6, North Korea successfully tested a miniaturized hydrogen nuclear device, according to the state broadcaster, KCTV. North Korea’s state news agency later stressed in a statement that Pyongyang will continue to build up its nuclear program as deterrence against potential aggression from the United States.

The statement further underscored that North Korea will act as a “responsible nuclear state”, and will use its nuclear armament only to defend its sovereignty. North Korea also vowed that it will not transfer its nuclear capabilities to other parties. If true, this is the first such device fielded by Pyongyang.

Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) said in a statement on Wednesday that seismic activity in North Korea took place near the country’s nuclear test site. Initial estimates gave readings measuring between 4.2 and 5.1 magnitude.

A nuclear bomb test in the same area in 2013 triggered a 5.1-magnitude quake.

This is the fourth such test by North Korea since 2006, while Washington has made it clear it will not engage with the North until it suspends or even reverses its nuclear and missile programs.

From Pyongyang’s perspective, however, a viable nuclear program is its only guarantee of avoiding any future attempt by the United States to try to trigger a “color revolution” in North Korea, or even carry out military action against Pyongyang.

A new test by the North raises tension on and around the Korean Peninsula. However, from the North’s point of view, any step that strengthens its long-term position is worth the minor disruptions to its relations with outside powers, especially, amid the destructive Western policy in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Thus, the North Korea nuclear issue is merely a part of the ongoing deterioration of international relations.

Every day, local officials across the United States make decisions that greatly impact the lives of the people they are supposed to serve. Sometimes, these decisions can have disastrous consequences.

One such case in Michigan is currently making national headlines and serves as an example that government officials on all levels must be watched closely.

This short video provides an excellent introduction to the current situation, which resulted in Michigan’s governor declaring a state of emergency this week. It shows state and local officials lying on camera simply because they think they can get away with it.

To save $5 million, these officials decided not to renegotiate a contract to get clean drinking water from Detroit, and instead opted to tap into the Flint River.

And some of these officials had been warned by the EPA months earlier that the river was contaminated with dangerous levels of lead.

Now, the residents of Flint are paying for the errors of their leaders. The lead-contaminated water is damaging the city’s water system but, more importantly, it threatens the health of anybody who drinks it. In the end, experts predict that the liability for this mistake will be “immense.”

It seems foolish to assume that this is an isolated problem of concern only to the immediate local population. As clean water becomes more scarce, might this be something we should all worry about?

Also, here’s former emergency manager Darnell Earley arguing that he’s not to blame for the decision to use the Flint River as the city’s source of drinking water:

In July 2015, two Jewish settlers threw a Molotov cocktail into a Palestinian homeand set it alight. Inside was a young family of four: a married couple and their two young sons. The building was fully engulfed by the time the parents awoke. They struggled desperately to get their boys out of the house. The mother swept up a blanket she thought contained her 18 month-old baby. But when she reached safety, to her horror she discovered the baby remained inside. They never reached him.

The mother and father had massive burns and each later died of their wounds after days of agonizing suffering in the hospital. Only their four year-old son survived them. Even he had burns over 60% of his body. They were eventually all taken to an Israeli hospital with a specialized burn unit. Ironically, in October the hospital forwarded the medical bills for treatment to the Palestinian Authority. Imagine: Israelis wipe out a family and Palestine has to foot the bill.

After the carnage was over, observers waited for the results of the investigation … and waited, and waited. In September, the Israeli defense minister suddenly announced that justice might never be done in order to protect the “methods and sources” of the Shabak (a Hebrew acronym for one of Israel’s major intelligence agencies, also known as Shin Bet). No suspects were arrested; the case seemed to be going nowhere.

International figures like Ban Ki Moon and other human rights authorities pressured the Israelis to announce results. All of a sudden, the hitherto somnolent security apparatus had to scramble to produce.

Arrests … better late than never

Amiram Benoliel, confessed murderer of Dawabsheh family.

In late November, several arrests were finally made. But, as in all similar security investigations, the Shabak put an ironclad gag order on the case. Names of suspects or their alleged roles could not be discussed in the media. Generally, the Shabak claim that these gag orders protect the integrity of the case and prevent other suspects from learning of the investigation.

Elisha Odess, 17, baby-eyed suspected killer of Dawabshe family. Caption: “We only have the Lord Blessed be He. We fear only Him.”

Israel Keller, Jewish radical suspected in the Dawabsheh murders and likely informant for Israel’s intelligence service, Shabak.

In many such cases, an Israeli security source provides confidential information to me that can’t be reported domestically. Because it can’t be reported inside Israel, it’s almost never reported outside either.

This source, though, offered an inside perspective on these matters. Throughout December, I reported the arrest of a number of individuals, their names, and what was known of their background. Some were arrested specifically for their connection to the Dawabsheh murders and others were arrested for other terror attacks against Palestinians. One of the most heinous of those was the arson attack against the historic Church of Loaves and Fishes in northern Israel.

Three of the suspects were of particular interest. Amiram Benoliel (sometimes transcribed “Ben Uliel”), Israel Keller and Elisha Odess. Late in December, the Israeli press reported that one of the prisoners had confessed to his role in the murders and helped the police reconstruct the crime. Though they could not report who this individual was, a coded Facebook posting from a settler activist alluded to Benoliel

This was confirmed over the past weekend, when the Shabak partially lifted the gag order to confirm that Benoliel was the main perpetrator and had confessed. The same report says that an accomplice was also charged, though he was not at the scene of the crime. It didn’t report his name. But my source confirms that the accomplice who helped plan the attack was Elisha Odess. He is also suspected in the church arson assault as well.

U.S. citizen charged in Dawabsheh murders

Odess is a U.S. citizen. His family in the U.S. has met with senators and asked the State Department to intervene on his behalf. They complained that he’d been arrested without his medications. The powerful settler lobby, consisting of communal leaders and rabbis, protested vehemently against alleged torture tactics used on the Jewish terror detainees.

Ilana Odess protest the treatment of Elisha Odess.
Photo: (Glenn Richter/Jewish Forward)

They failed to note that Palestinian security suspects are routinely tortured far worse for far less severe offenses. The methods of torture used are well known and documented by B’Tselem and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. Though Israeli human rights NGOs routinely oppose torture in all forms, settler groups never denounce Palestinian torture.

This murder case seems to have aroused the Israeli security services when so much previous Jewish terrorism hasn’t. They have arrested nearly 100 suspects. Many remain in administrative detention, under long-term arrest without trial. The Shabak itself tacitly acknowledges it has used torture and the Supreme Court, despite its prior rulings against the use of torture, has declined to direct the Shabak to desist.

Despite this reversal of decades of neglect, Israeli police continue using tactics that violate the rule of law and which are largely eschewed in democratic nations. The case relies largely on forced confessions rather than jury trials. In order to foil terror attacks, preventive detention (administrative detention) is used to put people away, rather than requiring prosecutors to build cases against them and try them. In addition, the illiberal use of gag orders hides the Shabak’s motives and shields the case from public scrutiny.

The settlers ostentatious, even outrageous, behavior demonstrates the terror elements among them. Last month, two prominent settler families with violent pasts celebrated the marriage of their children at a settlement. Hundreds of guests danced boisterously with assault rifles, Molotov cocktails, and knives held high in the air (it’s a common ritual at such weddings, and called the “Knife Dance”). They enlarged a photo of the Dawabsheh baby who died in the fire, and were seen on video stabbing it with a knife.

Watch Jewish Radicals Celebrating Wedding by Stabbing Photo of Dawabsheh Baby:

U.S. citizens’ role in Anti-Palestinian terror

I’ve made repeated requests of the State Department to comment on the numerous Americans who’ve been similar charged with murder and other violent crimes against Palestinians. Among them, Jack Teitel, Adam Livvix, and, now, Odess.

In a related matter, I asked the State Department to comment on the reported $220-million in tax-deductible donations from American Jews which fund Israel’s illegal settlements. A portion of these funds also support NGOs like Honenu, which directly fund convicted Israeli terrorists and their families during their prison terms. Among their largest donors are the Falic family of Florida, owners of Duty Free Shops of America. They made a 2011 $60,000 gift to an Israeli charity which is the fiscal sponsor for Honenu.

The State Department ignored my requests for comment. The silence of the U.S. government in the face of such support for terrorism suggests that we condemn Islamist terror while condoning Jewish terror.

Shabak’s “Man in Samaria”

A man mourns alongside the body of a one-and-a-half year old boy, Ali Dawabsheh, during his funeral in Duma village near the West Bank city of Nablus. The sleeping toddler was burned to death when Jewish assailants set fire to two Palestinian homes, an attack that also critically wounded the child’s 4-year-old brother and parents. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)

Returning to the night of the Dawabsheh murders, a Palestinian eyewitness saw two masked attackers stand over the burning figures of the father and mother taunting them. An Israeli settler security unit reported seeing Israelis (plural) leaving Duma that night. Yet the charge sheet for Benoliel says he was there alone.

We know that Odess was not at the scene of the crime. He had been supposed to meet Benoliel in a nearby cave, where they made their preparations for the assault. But he never showed and the eventual perpetrator left on his mission without him. So who was the mystery man?

That is where things get interesting. Returning to Defense Minister Bogie Yaalon’s earlier claim the case might never be solved because doing would compromise security sources. My source tells me that there was a mystery man involved in the plot. I call him, ironically, “Our Man in Samaria,” echoing Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. He was a settler youth who had a dual allegiance. He was among the plotters, but had been turned by a Shabak recruiter. The “plant” was supposed to report everything to his handler about the conspiracy (which had been given the name “The Rebellion,” echoing that of Bar Kochba against the ancient Romans), enabling authorities to disrupt violent crimes before they were committed. Except a most unfortunate thing happened. The agent provocateur betrayed his handlers and left them out in the cold.

Such a security betrayal is not without precedent in Israeli history. The Shabak had recruited someone in Yigal Amir’s circle to report on his plans before the Yitzhak Rabin assassination. Yet Avishai Raviv conveniently “forgot” to tell his handler that Amir had repeatedly threatened to kill Rabin. This left them blind at the very moment the most devastating political murder in the state’s history was being planned.

Israel’s security agencies (Shabak, Mossad and military intelligence) are exquisitely sensitive to how they are portrayed in the media and Israeli society. They have faced their share of embarrassments, scandals, and farces. They understand that their budgets and prestige are dependent on successes. Exposing yet another failure which led to the murder or a baby and the orphaning of his surviving brother would only bring further opprobrium on the Shabak.

So it was in no hurry to solve the crime if it didn’t have to. But after the international hue and cry, when it became clear that action was required, the domestic spy agency had to ensure the most damaging part of the story would not come out. At least not in the mainstream press.

But I believe that there was indeed a second attacker there that night. And it was the agent provocateur whose identity the Shabak desperately wants concealed.

I also have a suspicion (unconfirmed by my source) who the Shabak turncoat may be. One of the suspects Israel arrested is Israel Keller. But of all those arrested under suspicion of involvement in the Dawabsheh case, Keller was the only one released. I think there is a reason he was treated differently than the rest: Shabak’s Man in Samaria is Israel Keller.

Keller’s father enjoys a minor celebrity in Israeli pop consciousness. Nir Keller as a youth, developed an unlikely passion for surfing. Israel isn’t known for its surfing so he travels the world seeking out the world’s best surf spots. Even more startling, in early adulthood he became a Bratslaver Hasid, a follower of the 19th century wonder Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav.

If this set of personal qualities strikes you as fertile ground for fiction, an Israeli novelist agreed and wrote the book, Mekimi.  It includes a character, Brenner, based loosely on the real Keller.  He’s a fun-loving surfer dude who basks in the aura of the wisdom of “The Rebbe.”  The book was adapted for a successful cable TV miniseries, which is where Keller’s celebrity was made. Keller adds “terror dad” to his other striking appellations as surfer-Hasid.

Nir Keller holds especially racist views of both Palestinians and Blacks. During Hanukah, when Israel’s beloved President Reuven Rivlin travel to the White House to light Hanukkah candles with President Obama, Keller was calling the Israeli president “Der Fuhrer” on his Facebook page:

I never saw a kippah [head-covering] on the head of Der Führer Rivlin when he lit candles with the Arab [Obama] in the Black House.  I’m sure he never said the blessings over the candles either.  But even had he donned a kippah and said the blessings, there is no worse example of someone who goes down on bended knee and defiling God’s name in the history of the people of Israel..

Keller called Israel a “criminal state” for arresting his son and taunted Israel’s defense minister saying he lived in “Dumaland,” which is an insult comparable to calling Gaza “Hamastan.”

Israeli Media Falls Short in Reporting National Security

As this case develops, after authorities have elicited a confessed or laid charges, the gag orders will eventually be eased or removed entirely. Then Israeli media can report on it more openly. Possibly they can even expose aspects of it which are hitherto unknown, given how little information those reporting on it now have. But of one thing you may be sure: Israeli journalists will refuse to acknowledge the journalist who broke the gag as they’ve done with previous stories of mine; these very stories which put much of the pressure on the security apparatus to remove the gags, because they know a reporter already had the goods and was reporting it abroad anyway. It does seem, except in a few instances, there is an oath of omerta among Israeli media about acknowledging the role of outsider journalists, those who reject the national consensus on security matters and expose the secrets of the national security state.

Richard Silverstein is a MintPress analyst who has written the Tikun Olam blog since 2003, specializing in Israeli politics and US foreign affairs. He earned a BA from Columbia University, a BHL from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and MA in Comparative Literature from UCLA. Follow Richard on Twitter: @Richards1052

Washington, which leveled widespread sanctions against Russia in an increasingly tenuous bid to isolate and undermine the stability of Moscow, has found itself humiliated and backtracking as it lifts bans on Russia’s RD-180 rocket engines.

And even as Washington does so, the US media finds itself still painting Russia as a villain even as the US finds itself forced to buy rockets from a nation it claims invaded Crimea, is fostering a “hybrid war” in eastern Ukraine, and is bombing US-backed “rebels” in Syria. It is worth mentioning that Russia’s RD-180 rocket engines, possessing unparalleled performance US firms have yet to match, will be used to launch payloads into Earth orbit for the US Department of Defense.

Popular Science in its article “Congress Moves to Lift Ban on Using Russian Rocket Engines” claims:

After Russia invaded Crimea, Congress swore off Russian rocket engines. But its ban on using these rockets to launch military payloads into space was perhaps a bit too hasty. A new bill approved by Congress has found a way to nullify the ban.

United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that has long been the primary contractor for launching Defense Department payloads into space, relies on the Russian-made RD-180. ULA recently declined to bid on a launch contract due to its limited supply of rocket engines, and the Pentagon is not happy. Though ULA is developing a new engine, the BE-4 is years away from reaching the launch pad. This is, after all, rocket science that we’re talking about.

While Russia did not in fact “invade Crimea,” Popular Science is correct in pointing out that a ULA-made replacement for the Russian RD-180’s is years from becoming a reality.

Popular Science also hints toward another reason that might be behind the lift of sanctions on Russian rockets:

ULA has long had a monopoly on military payload launches. SpaceX recently got permission to use its Falcon 9 rocket to launch military payloads as well, right around the time ULA dropped out because of the ban. If the ban is lifted, it means ULA and SpaceX will take part in the first competition for a military launch since 2006–and that could translate into savings for the U.S. government.

Ironically, a desire by ULA (a joint venture between defense industry giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin) to maintain their monopoly and all the unwarranted power and wealth associated with it, has forced them to do business with one of the nations it and a collection of other special interests on Wall Street, in Washington and in London have been attempting to undermine, divide and destroy for decades.

SpaceX seeks to disrupt and decentralize the aerospace industry, a direct threat to Boeing and Lockheed Martin both in short-term and long-term regards.

And it seems that both in short-term and long-term regards, the strategy of these special interests on Wall Street, in Washington and in London, is incoherent and self-defeating. As it attempts to isolate and undermine Moscow, it finds itself threatened by disruptive business models and innovators at home in America. To tamp down domestic competition, these interests have ended up rolling back sanctions against foreign competitors.

Impotent and incoherent, it appears that the US has managed to do more harm to itself than to Russia. While Russia is certainly suffering from sanctions, should it overcome them, it will come out stronger and more self-sufficient on the other side. For the US however, win or lose against Russia, it is clearly harming itself in the process.

For the global public looking on, flooded daily with news and op-eds about how much of a threat Russia is to global peace and stability, the fact that the US Department of Defense is still essentially buying rockets from Russia to put American satellites into orbit should serve as a reminder that nothing resembling actual principles, facts or honesty guides US foreign policy or how it is presented across US and European media.

If the US finds itself unable to justify continued sanctions against Russian rockets, rockets used in vital roles for maintaining US defense capabilities, how is the US continuing to justify other sanctions against Russia that remain in place? Are these sanctions in place simply because the businesses being hurt by them across the West lack the lobbying power of Boeing and Lockheed Martin? And are we expected to continue believing Russia is such a “threat” but still America’s primary partner in launching defense satellites into space, not to mention American and European astronauts and supply missions to the International Space Station?

In fact, flip-flopping on Russian sanctions seems like it should indicate to various stakeholders in Washington and London’s international order that it is looking less like an organized global enterprise, and more like a blind tropism seeking profits wherever it finds them, even if they are over the edge of a cliff. For these stakeholders, it may be time to consider divesting and/or diversifying into something truly looking with its eyes open toward the future and toward real progress.

Ulson Gunnar is a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

[Featured image: State Department Spokesman John Kirby. Source: Wikipedia]

A “working paper” written by US diplomats envisions Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ceding power to a new government by March 2017. The State Department confirmed the document was authentic, but denied that it represented official US policy.

The key points of the policy paper were published on Wednesday by the Associated Press. It envisions an 18-month political process, starting with talks in Vienna next month and ending in Assad’s resignation next year.

According to the document, by April there would be a “security committee” composed of members of the current government and opposition groups. By May, the Syrian parliament would be dissolved and a new transitional authority established, with the mission to draft a new constitution and pass reforms. The Syrians would vote on the constitution in a referendum scheduled for January 2017. Two months later, the paper says, Assad “relinquishes presidency; inner circle departs.”

At the press conference on Wednesday, State Department spokesman John Kirby acknowledged the paper was authentic, but tried to dismiss it as a working-level document written by a staff member.

“That kind of work is done here at the State Department all the time,” Kirby said, adding that it did not represent official US policy but merely laid out a potential timeline for the political process in Syria.

“All these are targets,” Kirby said. “Our hope and expectation is that the entire 18-month process will start this month.”

Does envisioning Assad’s departure next year, rather than right away, suggest that Washington wants to avoid a power vacuum that could be exploited by Islamic State, RT’s Gayane Chichakyan asked.

While acknowledging that the US wanted to avoid a collapse of Syrian institutions, Kirby said the US policy towards the Syrian president has not changed. He cited Secretary of State John Kerry as saying that “the exact timing of his departure isn’t something that we’re fixated on.”

In December, the UN Security Council passed a resolution endorsing the political process that would set up “inclusive and non-sectarian governance” in Syria, using the 18-month timeline framework referenced in the State Department document.

Kirby’s efforts to dismiss the document, and AP’s coverage of it, as somehow irrelevant irked the agency’s chief diplomatic correspondent Matt Lee, who at one point asked: “Are your arms a little tired, [from] the straw man you put up to knock down?”

Earlier in the briefing, Lee needled Kirby over the statements about North Korea that made it sound as if the Obama administration rejected reality.

“We will not accept North Korea as a nuclear armed state. And yet it is,” Lee said. “You also say this about other things. You say you’ll never accept Crimea as a part of Russia. Yet it is.”

“Isn’t it time to recognize these things for what they are and not live in this in this illusion, or fantasy, where you pretend that things that are, are not?” Lee asked, to chuckles in the briefing room.

“The short answer is, no,” Kirby retorted, denying that Washington lived in a fantasy world. Rather, he argued, there was a difference between dealing with reality and officially acknowledging it.

Syria has been embroiled in a civil war since 2011, with fractious rebel groups backed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the US demanding the ouster of President Assad. The conflict has claimed an estimated 250,000 lives and displaced millions. Russia and Iran have resisted all efforts by outside powers to determine Syria’s future, insisting that this would be a decision for the Syrians themselves.

[Featured image: Yale School of Public Health]

In an analysis of more than 1,000 chemicals in fluids used in and created by hydraulic fracturing (fracking), Yale School of Public Health researchers found that many of the substances have been linked to reproductive and developmental health problems, and the majority had undetermined toxicity due to insufficient information.

Further exposure and epidemiological studies are urgently needed to evaluate potential threats to human health from chemicals found in fracking fluids and wastewater created by fracking, said the research team in their paper, published Jan. 6 in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental and Epidemiology.

Illustration by Pat Lynch / Yale University

The research team evaluated available data on 1,021 chemicals used in fracking, a process that recovers oil and natural gas from deep within the ground by using a mixture of hydraulic-fracturing fluids that can contain hundreds of chemicals. The process creates significant amounts of wastewater and fractures the bedrock, posing a potential threat to both surface water and underground aquifers that supply drinking water, note the researchers.

While they lacked definitive information on the toxicity of the majority of the chemicals, the team members analyzed 240 substances and concluded that 157 of them — chemicals such as arsenic, benzene, cadmium, lead, formaldehyde, chlorine, and mercury — were associated with either developmental or reproductive toxicity. Of these, 67 chemicals were of particular concern because they had an existing federal health-based standard or guideline, said the scientists, adding that data on whether levels of chemicals exceeded the guidelines were too limited to assess.

“This evaluation is a first step to prioritize the vast array of potential environmental contaminants from hydraulic fracturing for future exposure and health studies,” said Nicole Deziel, senior author and assistant professor of public health. “Quantification of the potential exposure to these chemicals, such as by monitoring drinking water in people’s homes, is vital for understanding the public health impact of hydraulic fracturing.”

Some previous studies have observed associations between proximity to hydraulic fracturing sites and reproductive and developmental problems, but they did not investigate specific chemicals. This latest evaluation could inform the design of future studies by highlighting which chemicals could have the highest probability of health impact, note the researchers.

Fracking has increased dramatically in recent years and the practice is expected to grow in the future. It involves drilling into the earth — as deep as two miles — and releasing a high-pressure mixture of water, sand, and chemicals that fracture the rock and release the gas trapped inside. Fracking is now commonly used in the United States and has significantly boosted domestic natural gas production and driven down prices.

However, the practice may come with a significant public health consequences, warn critics of fracking, noting that the process has the potential to contaminate drinking water supplies with toxic chemicals. Air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and small earth tremors from the drilling and waste disposal processes are also cited as concerns.

“We focused on reproductive and developmental toxicity because these effects may be early indicators of environmental hazards. Gaps in our knowledge highlight the need to improve our understanding of the potential adverse effects associated with these compounds,” said Elise Elliott, a public health doctoral student and the paper’s first author.

The researchers determined that wastewater produced by fracking may be even more toxic than the fracking fluids themselves. This led the researchers to conclude that more focus is needed to study not just what goes into the well, but what chemicals and by-products are generated during the fracking process.

The researchers also noted that the 781 chemicals for which information is currently lacking need to be rigorously analyzed to determine if they pose health threats.

In addition to Deziel and Elliott, the research team included Yale School of Public Health Deputy Dean Brian Leaderer; Michael Bracken, the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology (chronic diseases); and Adrienne Ettinger, an assistant professor at the school when the research was conducted.

In 1999, NATO bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days, culminating in the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops from the Serbian province of Kosovo. Tens of thousands were killed or maimed by the airstrikes, and Kosovo was carved out as a NATO statelet under the control of UNMIK (the United Nations Mission in Kosovo) in alliance with its local quislings the Kosovo Liberation Army (the KLA).

Last month’s parliamentary debate on British airstrikes in Syria witnessed several MPs citing the operation as a great success. Labour MP Ivan Lewis was “proud of the difficult choices that we made” in Kosovo and elsewhere, which he claimed “saved hundreds of thousands of lives”.

Kosovo was particularly held up by those supporting British military action in Syria as an example of how airstrikes alone, without support from ground forces, can be victorious. Mocking those who argued that “coalition action which rests almost wholly on bombing…will have little effect”, Margaret Beckett responded “well, tell that to the Kosovans, and do not forget that if there had not been any bombing in Kosovo perhaps 1 million Albanian Muslim refugees would be seeking refuge in Europe.”

Conservative MP Richard Benyon concurred, adding: “I asked one my constituents––someone who knows a bit about this, General Sir Mike Jackson––whether he could remember any conflict where air power alone made a difference. He thought and said one word: Kosovo.”

The argument is entirely fallacious. One obvious difference between the NATO bombing of Kosovo in 1999 and the British bombing of Syria today is the contrast in their stated aims. NATO was ostensibly bombing Yugoslavia to achieve a limited goal – the secession of Kosovo. In Syria today, however, the ostensible aim of airstrikes against ISIS is the destruction of ISIS. In other words, while the first aimed to force a concession from the force it was targeting; the other apparently aims at the total elimination of its target. While enough punishment might persuade someone to concede a demand, it will not persuade anyone to agree to their own eradication. There is, thus, no parallel in the logic behind the two campaigns, and anyone trying to draw one is being entirely disingenuous.

Secondly, when the actual historical record is examined it becomes clear that, even on its own terms, NATO did not actually achieve its demands. The Rambouillet ‘agreement’ was NATO’s eleventh hour diktat to Yugoslavia on the eve of bombing, designed to be rejected in order to justify the bombing raids. The key bone of contention for Yugoslavia in this document was that it demanded NATO troops be granted full access to air fields, roads, ports and railroads across the country – that is to say, an effective NATO occupation of the entire federal republic.

Obviously, as Sara Flounders and John Catalinotto of the International Action Centre have written, “no self-respecting government could accept such an ultimatum”. Instead, the Yugoslav government offered to withdraw their troops from Kosovo. This was rejected by NATO, who began bombing within days. After nearly three months of heroic resistance from the Yugoslav people, the bombing ended with Yugoslav troops withdrawing from Kosovo – without any NATO occupation of the rest of the country. That is to say, the war was brought to a close on the terms originally offered by the Yugoslavs, and not on the terms demanded by NATO at the outset: hardly the overwhelming victory claimed by the likes of British General Mike Jackson.

What really gives the lie to the ‘Kosovo success’ narrative, however, is simply the condition of NATO’s statelet today. An in-depth piece by Vedat Xhymshiti in Foreign Policy Journal last month notes that “Kosovo is the poorest and most isolated country in Europe, with millionaire politicians steeped in crime. A third of the workforce is unemployed, and corruption is widespread. Youth unemployment (those aged 25 and under) stands at 2 in 3, and nearly half of the 1.8 million citizens of Kosovo are considered to be in poverty. From December 2014 until February 2015, about 5% of the population was forced to leave the country in an effort to find a better life, studies and more dignified jobs, on their uncertain path towards wealthier countries in the EU.”

The British MPs’ argument that NATO’s takeover of Kosovo was achieved by airstrikes alone, without ground forces, is a lie. NATO’s allies in 1999 were the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), a violent sectarian group who openly sought the establishment of an ethnically supremacist state – much like the forces supported by NATO in Libya, Syria and Ukraine. Once NATO had destroyed the Yugoslav administration in Kosovo, effective power on the ground passed to the KLA, who set about implementing their vision of an ethnically pure Kosovo via a series of pogroms, massacres and persecutions of the province’s Serb, Jewish and Roma populations. They gained effective control of Kosovan politics, and used this power to guarantee themselves impunity both for their historic and ongoing war crimes, and for their massive expansion of organized criminality.

In December 2010, a Council of Europe report named Kosovan Prime Minister and former KLA leader Hashim Thaci “the head of a “mafia-like” Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe”, according the Guardian newspaper’s summary. Following NATO’s intervention, Thaci’s Drenica group within the KLA, according to the report, seized control of “most of the illicit criminal enterprises” in which Kosovans were involved in Albania. The report noted that “agencies dedicated to combating drug smuggling in at least five countries have named Hashim Thaçi and other members of his Drenica group as having exerted violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics.” The human rights investigator who authored the report, Dick Marty, commented that: “Thaçi and these other Drenica group members are consistently named as ‘key players’ in intelligence reports on Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organised crime.”

In addition to their leading role in Europe’s heroin smuggling trade, Thaci and his group were also named as having been responsible for a professional organ smuggling operation involving the kidnapping and murder of Serb civilians in order to harvest and sell their kidneys. Currently serving as both Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Thaci’s NATO protection guarantees he has never been brought to justice for any of these crimes.

Indeed, NATO-sponsored impunity has been a consistent theme amongst the new Kosovan elite. A report by Amnesty International published in August 2013 noted that “the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) singularly failed to investigate the abduction and murders of Kosovo Serbs in the aftermath of the 1998-1999 conflict” adding that “UNMIK’s failure to investigate what constituted a widespread, as well as a systematic, attack on a civilian population and, potentially, crimes against humanity, has contributed to the climate of impunity prevailing in Kosovo.” Marty’s report, too, noted the “faltering political will on the part of the international community to effectively prosecute the former leaders of the KLA”, and Carla del Ponte, former chief war crimes prosecutor at the Hague, stated that she was barred from prosecuting KLA leaders.

UNMIK’s responsibilities for police and justice came to an end in December 2008, following Kosovo’s controversial declaration of independence. It was replaced by the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX), which, according to Amnesty International, inherited 1,187 war crimes cases that UNMIK had failed to investigate. All the signs are that the overt impunity that has prevailed up until now will be replaced by lip service to the rule of law, accompanied by the prosecution of a few low level operatives, whilst maintaining the protection for those at the top. Following the Council of Europe’s damning report, EULEX spent three years investigating the claims, eventually publishing a verdict that was a textbook case of damage-limitation whitewash. EULEX concluded that the crimes were indeed real, and were linked to leading KLA members, but refused to corroborate the names of any specific individuals involved, despite copious evidence. Thaci’s protection, it seems, is absolute.

Nevertheless, in August of this year, the Kosovan parliament finally and grudgingly approved (after initially rejecting) the establishment of a special war crimes court to prosecute KLA leaders for crimes committed between 1998 and 2000. In moves highly reminiscent of scenes outside both the Libyan and Ukrainian parliaments when tentative and tokenistic legal moves were made to end the impunity of the sectarian death squads, the parliament has come under repeated attack ever since. Riots and six separate teargas attacks by the opposition have brought the normal functioning of the Kosovan parliament to a standstill. Failed state status surely beckons.

Meanwhile, the credibility of EULEX, whose officials will be overseeing the establishment of the new court, was further thrown into doubt in November 2014 when Andrea Capussela, former head of UNMIK’s economic unit, released the results of an in-depth analysis of the most significant cases in which EULEX had been involved. Seven of these she claimed had only been brought after intense international pressure, whilst in a further eight, no investigation was carried out at all, despite “credible and well-documented evidence strongly suggesting that serious crimes had been committed.”

She noted that “Eulex’s conduct in these 15 cases – the eight ignored ones and the seven opened under pressure – suggests that the mission tended not to prosecute high-level crime, and, when it had to, it sought not to indict or convict prominent figures”. During its six years of operating, she noted, only four convictions had been secured – three of them against only secondary figures, whilst “higher-ranking figures linked to the same crimes were either not investigated or indicted”. A senior Kosovan investigator noted that “There are people killing people and getting away with it because of Unmik and Eulex,” adding that “The political elite and Eulex have fused. They are indivisible. The laws are just for poor people,” Indeed, Eulex seem to be operating increasingly like a mafia themselves, last year, putting “pressure”, according to Amnesty International, on “journalist, Vehbi Kajtazi, who had reported alleged corruption in EULEX”.

In a final twist to NATO’s ‘success story’, Kosovo has now become the largest per-capita provider of fighters for regime change in Syria. The official figure is 300 but more reliable estimates suggests the true figure is more than 1000 (from a population of 2 million), including one of the top ten ISIS commanders, Lavdrim Muhaxheri. As state education, along with most other social provision, has collapsed since 1999, Saudi-sponsored Madrasas have filled the gap, providing an extreme Wahhabi sectarian education now feeding its first generation of impoverished graduates into NATO’s new Syrian battlefields. No surprise, then, that Kosovan government’s efforts to prevent this have been “superficial and ineffective”, according to David Philips in the Huffington Post.

The ‘lesson’ of Kosovo, then, is not that “airpower works” or any other such nonsense. The real lesson is what it reveals about NATO’s formula for the destruction of independent regional powers – relying on a combination of aerial bombardment alongside the empowerment of local sectarian death squads, who come to dominate the political scene in the aftermath, obliterating the rule of law and guaranteeing a dysfunctional state incapable of providing either dignity or security to its citizens. This was the same formula that was used on Libya in 2011 and currently being attempted in Syria today. Of course, for NATO, all of this is indeed a success: Yugoslavia dismembered; its resources plundered at the expense of its desperate and impoverished people; and Kosovo turned into a provider of shock troops for regime change in Syria, and transit hub for heroin and organ trafficking. If this is what NATO calls a success, we must all pray for failure.

The Dag Hammarskjöld Library at the United Nations — named after the secretary general who died in 1961 — doesn’t make the news very often. Meant to be used by the professional Secretariat staff of the UN and by national delegations, it stores documents and publications from the UN and related organizations, as well as a raft of other books and materials on international relations, law, economics, and other UN-relevant topics. So, you know, a library.

But even the UN’s library has a social media presence now, and recently it tweeted the publication that got checked out the most frequently in 2015:

To be clear: The UN is full of delegates representing awful dictatorships, and the book that got checked out the most from the UN library was about … how to be immune from war crimes prosecution. That does not seem like a good thing!

The book in question isn’t a UN document — it’s a doctoral thesis from the University of Lucerne by Ramona Pedretti, pursuing the question of when heads of state and other government officials can be charged in foreign courts. Generally, she explains, there are two forms of immunity in international law from which heads of state can benefit.

“Immunity ratione personae prevents incumbent Heads of State from being subjected to foreign criminal jurisdiction,” Pedretti writes. “In contrast, immunity ratione materiae protects official acts, i.e. acts performed in an official capacity on behalf of the State, from scrutiny by foreign courts.”

She concludes that immunity ratione personae is absolute, and thus that domestic courts in one country can’t indict the sitting leader of another nation, whereas ratione materiae can be invalidated for defendants who’ve left office — as happened with the arrests of the Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann by Israel and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet by Spain. Basically, Pedretti is arguing that incumbent heads of state can’t be charged and prosecuted by a foreign court, whereas past heads of state can.

Matters are slightly different for the International Criminal Court, a treaty-based permanent court that has indicted incumbents — notably current Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in 2009. As Pedretti explains, those cases can still raise ratione personae issues, and the African Union invoked that principle in condemning Bashir’s indictment. The Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC disagreed, arguing that international courts are generally exempt from ratione personae restrictions, which are only meant to apply to domestic courts in foreign countries (e.g., it means the United States can’t indict, say, Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe in American court).

Pedretti ultimately argues that leaders of countries that ratified the ICC’s underlying treaty, and ones whose cases were referred by the UN Security Council (like Bashir’s), are vulnerable to seeing their ratione personae immunity taken away, but that it goes too far to say that all heads of statement lack immunity before the court.

It’s all very nuanced and interesting stuff, especially if you have reason to think you’ve committed crimes that could land you in the Hague!

America is to be judged by its citizens, not its politicians. But if Americans lose contact with one another; substitute real, tangible realities with virtual ones projected on internet and television screens; refuse to engage in the democratic process and choose passivity over involvement, nihilism over hope, fatalism over self-determination; remain complacent about if not ignorant of US actions and wars in the world; adopt definitions of themselves that are crafted by self-serving special interests, profiteers or merchants of war and hate running now for president from both political parties, they lose all concepts of who they are, what they stand for, and what really constitutes American values.

As it stands, Americans are on the cusp of recognizing that they are losing their historic identity, or the one they embraced before 9/11. 

In the collective American consciousness questing for material objects, success, fame, wealth, property and stock equities, together with a megalomaniacal drive for Empire to dominate a world now splitting itself into East and West, there remains no public figure speaking for “everyone”; for unity through diversity; for peace; for the poor, homeless, disabled and elderly; for children and young people who will inherit a financially bankrupt nation that cheerleads its populist billionaires who take all, avoid taxes, give little back, blame the scapegoat, and ignore the plight of others, particularly the plight of young generations who will inherit it all as they advance into tomorrow’s leadership positions. Who speaks for them?

Almost unconsciously, Americans salute a market-centric culture unaware it is controlled by Wall Street, bond traders, speculators, hedge funds and enormous multinational corporations and banking hegemons. Silicon Valley young technocratic tycoons provide proof of American superiority and exceptionalism and the momentous rewards capitalism bestows. The rewards of capitalism, however, go to the few and fewer and what are concealed in a sea of commercials and seamless hype are what many young people should already know; for during a majority of their years as mature adults America has been a nation of non-stop endless wars; has become the largest debtor nation in the world – debt that can’t be repaid and probably won’t be repaid. It has devolved into waves of police-sanctioned violence and murders, socially damaging hate-groups and vicious political vitriolic. When done in the name of competition and profits, it legally sanctions illegalities.

Young people have learned privacy is non-existent and social interactions take place using costly digital devices connected through toll booths owned by corporate networks behind whose one-way mirror sit both government and mega-corporations amassing personal information, biometrics, opinions, attitudes, consumer behavior, political affiliations, friendships, credit and banking details, and their psychographic profiles for private profit and for social and government behavior-mod programs and social engineering.

Many have learned a stable job of 40 hours per week with benefits, sick pay and vacation time is a luxury afforded a few. Some have learned to live at home with mom and dad at age 25 because they can’t afford high rents at meager wages, let alone purchase a home. Some will live through decades of paying-off college loans that delivered greater debt peonage than employment opportunity.  They have seen how credit is mistakenly viewed as an asset and used to salvage households that have undergone decades of stagnant wages. They have seen benefits accrue in accumulation of wealth for employers, corporations and investment banks.

Should they ever run for president, they know they will have to agree to kill “innocent people and children”, conduct drone operations on “targeted assassination” lists, approve and expand America’s seamless dragnet surveillance state, enlist people their age to die for wars they had no say in and no true understand of. If young people think the American Dream is over and act apart and clustered together in a swarm, they do so for good reasons: there are no public figures offsetting the “post 9/11 normal” with incisive alternatives, real debate, knowledgeable dissent and penetrative truths about the causes underlying America’s many imbroglios. It should be no surprise that most millennials didn’t vote in 2014 (87% stayed home).

But the “9/11 normal” in this country is not the normal I knew, is not the America that weaned me, is not the normal I wish to live under or see young people struggle with in order to survive. If any group is blameless in causing any one problem now afflicting America, it is they. But they are too young to have known a better time; some can’t imagine one; many have relegated America before 9/11 to the history books! This is how it seems for a millennial.

My employee was neither normal nor “new normal”, but an example of what UK economist Guy Standing calls “The Precariat: The New Dangerous Generation”. [1] This self-defined uneducated, politically unaware person who worked for me over five years suddenly presented a dangerous and threatening remark recently. Knowing she cannot find Chicago on the map; knowing she is encircled by friends and family with little grasp of government, American history or the democratic process,  she asked me to define a “white supremacist”, which I did in detail. Knowing she defines African-Americans as “dem people” and everything she hears about President Obama is that he’s “gonna take guns away”, I proceeded cautiously. At the finish, she replied to my explanation with emphatically shocking defiance.  She shouted back ferociously: “Obama should be assassinated!”

Keeping calm, I asked why he should be assassinated? “Because he’s not good for America,” she quipped. “Why isn’t he good?” I asked. She looked up and down, rolled her eyes, looked up and down and with a coy self-effacing smile beamed, “Gee, I don’t know.”

Her supervisor didn’t find the remark troublesome but did cite her for talking politics to a client and pulled her from my account. “You finally got to see who and what she really is,” stressed the supervisor. Later, in conversation, a police chief told me her inflammatory statement was to be considered a “form of free speech”; and I should “consider the source”. I replied that for many people who lived through three assassinations in the 1960s, a call for the killing of a president is not to be defended as free speech or viewed lightly. If a majority of Americans do find it defendable, America is in far worse shape today than at any other time in my 68 years, I answered. Although this worker is far from committing such an act, how many people does she represent who might try to commit this crime? No president need be assassinated when the legal system is available to remove one from office peacefully.

The worker is a “precariat” and does not represent America, nor do those who feel as she does. Police-violence and murders of young blacks by errant and rogue officers do not represent the standard for law enforcement and are illegal acts in both character and degree. Wall Street greed and asset-stripping neoliberalism are byproducts of a capitalism that has been unregulated, becoming voracious and predatory. America is a nation and capitalism is an economic and market system adopted by the nation. Capitalism is not a nation unto itself controlling its host country. Yet, the market system is striving to gain complete control over this nation at all levels through powerful economic institutions with support from libertarian zealots, “small government” conservatives to far-right extremists hoisting flags, a Constitution and a Bible.

The right-wing presently in control of the Republican party and exhibiting increasing power over Congress, the White House and media are not American but anti-American and unAmerican in my opinion. Indeed, they constitute a “fifth column” undermining democracy, peace, security, welfare and brotherhood which are the true historical hallmarks of our secular democracy. What seeds have been planted during the last decades – from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to financial capitalism, privatizations, off-shoring of jobs to the Pacific Rim and China, collapse of the country’s industrial base and infrastructure, neoliberal restructuring of public finances, neoconservative Empire building through endless wars of aggression, decimation of social and welfare programs that were won for all Americans in the 1930s and 1960s – have borne the bitter herbs today of hate, violence, religious bigotry, racism, and mounting threats of war with Russia and China in order to circumvent and abort an inevitable transition from a U.S. dominated unipolar world to a bipolar one.

Such a bipolar world challenges America’s “full spectrum dominance” and particularly threatens to dislodge the U.S. dollar as world reserve currency. The agents of this “post 9/11 new normal” are leading the nation into the grip of what Europeans today call by its rightful name: fascism, the merger of state and corporate power militarily enforced . Will Americans allow it?

European nations are seeing a rise of neo-Nazis and self-proclaimed fascists. [2] [3]  By reflecting popular discontent over imposed austerity, an influx of immigrants fleeing war zones in the mid-East, the perceived loss of national sovereignty to Brussels, the rise of fascistic right-wing parties in many EU nations are exploiting growing anti-government attitudes and creating political power formations in scenes highly reminiscent of the 1930s. In some respects, the propaganda diatribes and appeals by the Tea Party, Faith and Freedom Coalition and other U.S. “anti-government” groups of far-right libertarians, survivalists, white supremacists, militias, sovereign citizens, nativists and Christian theocrats bear comparison to programs and platforms of Pegida in Germany, National Front in France and Golden Dawn in Greece. [4]

More importantly, resemblances exist between the anti-government, anti-immigrant, racist, nativist and anarchistic rhetoric and appeals of these groups in both Europe and the United States with positions publicly endorsed and vocalized by Republican candidates for president, particularly by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. [5]  In the course of more than a decade, the GOP permitted itself to be hijacked by right-wing conservatives advancing today’s extremism in order to win elections and in winning perpetuate the rise of the corporate, banking and military-industrial state at the expense of workers and the social safety net. Populist far-right “people” movements from below and the corporate-military-intel-wealth “power elite” from above are twin forces undermining what remnants remain of American democracy. They will call it by many other names, but Europeans call it fascism.

Americans resist the label “fascism” because, as Sinclair Lewis observed eighty-one years ago, Americans are convinced “it can’t happen here”. [6] They are wrong. It can happen here, is happening here and the question becomes how far will it metastasize within the body politic? The frightening degree of popular interest measured by TV ratings of recent political debates where collective hate and war-mongering are staged as positive and constructive solutions to America’s imbroglios of crises further demoralizes the population and weakens the national immune system against this cancer metastasizing.

What is America, its people, culture and set of values? By mid-century, it was the leader of the world politically and economically. By the mid-60s, it boasted a “mixed economy” balancing the needs of profit with social welfare. It once fostered peace at home and in the world; it co-existed with its main rival, the Soviet Union, in a balance of power arrangement and in so doing avoided war. Two nuclear powers can only assure each other peace through sanity lest mutual destruction be the result if one or the other starts war – a fact obfuscated by today’s war mongers in Congress and on the presidential campaign platforms; their sociopathic threats are echoed without challenge in American mass-media, the very vehicles used to successfully engineer war-fever and hysteria on the basis of few facts, some lies, and reams of accusations lacking evidence. Americans fail to know the extent of its bombing campaigns, its coups, the number of dead innocents labeled “collateral damage” by the Pentagon, its purposeful destabilization of nations to secure resources and install puppet governments subservient to Washington. Few Americans suspect that the deaths of almost a million and injuries to millions more in the middle-east caused by American-NATO bombings might someday return in kind. Americans are fearful of terrorist acts within their country but fail to understand how we have sponsored, trained and financed terrorists to fight our “dirty wars” from the 1980s in Afghanistan to today in Syria and Iraq. Americans are fearful and thus paralyzed. What a perfect opportunity for a dictator and fascist to exploit.

“America is a moderate country with a slight tilt to the right,” claimed a friend in the mid-West. On the other hand, activist-historian William Blum claims America is not a force for good in the world but a rogue state that is the greatest threat to humanity. [7] [8]  People that largely ignore the rise of police powers, the surveillance state, the cost of endless wars, and the decline of civil liberties are called “sheeple” by critics. Members of the press and media who have abandoned their role as objective journalists and become public relations spokespeople for the State Dept., Pentagon, Wall Street and CIA are known as “presstitutes”. Taken together, democracy is replaced with mindless consumption of media propaganda leaving authorities and power-centers freedom of movement to act and control without constraint or opposition.

World leaders are tentatively understanding the need to act together to resolve global crises that are infecting all layers within societies. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to three minutes to minute citing nuclear wars and ecological cataclysms ahead given the current projectory. [9]  Pope Francis in his highly secular eco-enclyclical Laudato Si! outlines a basal text for a concerted trans-national approach to solve climate change, economic disparities and mushrooming military build-ups in nations. [10] Francis spoke frankly and truthfully when he bravely confessed to an unbelieving and disoriented world that World War III has already begun fought piecemeal. [11]  The Dalai Lama also spoke frankly when he said God wasn’t going to solve our problems. We created them and we need to fix them. God’s not going to do it for us. [12]

America is at war and is planning for greater ones, but its greatest war is the battle within itself. Who is America? What is America? What does America stand for? These questions will be answered but not without conflict, social disruption, acts of civil disobedience, emerging whistleblowers risking careers and livelihoods to speak truth in a sea of disinformation and eroding morality. Campaign officials expect the cost for this year’s presidential campaign to reach $5 billion, most of that money going into the coffers of network and cable TV which, in turn, will please their sponsors – political parties, power brokers and wealth sectors  – and media will remain a house of presstitution. [13] [14]

Democracy needs an informed electorate but Americans have been “dumbed down” enough to believe they have no power over government decisions and economic policies. They are paralyzed by it. In a relatively short span of time, beginning from September 11, 2001, democracy has been under attack by forces from within rather than from without. It has been stolen by hidden unelected financial, corporate and military-industrial cartels that have inculcated fear and exploited it as a pretext for citizens to relinquish liberties. By their own narrow vision induced by rampant consumerism, poor knowledge about government and economics, Americans have endorsed politicians who make wars, relegate human beings secondary to private profit and markets, who conquer dissent, diversity and strength-in-numbers using the mechanism of “identity politics”, who turn morality on its head by taking from the poor and giving to the rich, who call the peaceful weak and the warrior strong, who enshrine our Empire as “exceptional” and “indispensable” on the basis of myths that no longer exist and that fewer and fewer nations believe, including so-called “allies”.

Inscribed in the DNA of America is a deep-seated belief in “destiny”. America had it, lost it, and will someday regain it. It is not found in profits, property, gold, markets or Empire building. The work of ascertaining, identifying and perpetuating this destiny will fall upon tomorrow’s leaders selected from the ranks of millennials and those younger, Generation Z. It will live or die according to their wisdom or their folly. They will build upon a new paradigm or fail trying to resuscitate the old. They will be Lot of the Bible and move forward knowing only one step ahead, or be Sara who turned to salt by fixing her stare upon what was crumbling behind her. The first question to answer must be: What is the ideal world you wish for yourself, family, friends, community and nation? Once realized and empowered by sincere intent and motivation, it will materialize. The world of tomorrow begins in concept today. To more forward, don’t look back. Build it, and if it is for the common good of all Americans and all people of the world, “they will come”.

Others who staunchly support peace, world-wide harmony, justice, non-violence, democracy and the safety of mother earth are good people whose intentions, influence and silent acts now hold hope for our nation and world.

But many more good people must do something. And the time for doing it is now.

Michael T Bucci is a retired public relations executive currently living in New England. He has authored nine books on practical spirituality collectively titled The Cerithous Material.

Notes:

[1] Standing, Guy (2014). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Generation. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN  9781472536167.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-precariat-9781472536167/

[2] “Fear, Anger and Hatred: The Rise of Germany’s New Right“, Spiegel Online, December 11, 2015.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/refugee-crisis-drives-rise-of-new-right-wing-in-germany-a-1067384.html

[3] “WELCOME TO THE ‘RECHTSRUTSCH’: The far right is quietly making massive gains in Europe“, Business Insider, October 19, 2015.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-far-right-is-quietly-making-massive-gains-in-europe-2015-10?r=UK&IR=T

[4] “How does the Tea Party compare with European far right movements?”, Baker Institute for Public Policy.

https://bakerinstitute.org/media/files/files/f6f08c52/IFRI-pub-SirkesTeaParty-2012-1-.pdf

[5] Cas Mudde, “The Trump phenomenon and the European populist radical right”, Washington Post, August 26, 2015.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/08/26/the-trump-phenomenon-and-the-european-populist-radical-right/

[6] Lewis, Sinclair (1935). It Can’t Happen Here. New York: Signet ISBN 9780451465641

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/293163/it-cant-happen-here-by-sinclair-lewis/9780451465641/

[7] Blum, William (2013). America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy. London: Zed Books ISBN-13: 978-1780324456

http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/paperback/americas-deadliest-export

[8] Kevin Zeese, “US Empire Reaches Breaking Point. Greatest Threat to Humanity. Time To End It, Global Research, July 20, 2014

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-empire-reaches-breaking-point-greatest-threat-to-humanity-time-to-end-it/5392310

[9] “It is Three Minutes to Midnight”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Janaury 19, 2015

http://thebulletin.org/clock/2015

[10] Pope Francis (2015). Encyclical Letter Laudato Si!, On Care for Our Common Home. Full text at Vatican web site.

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

[11] Athena Yenko, “World War 3 Has Begun – Pope Francis”, Morning News USA, June 9, 2015.

http://www.morningnewsusa.com/world-war-3-has-begun-pope-francis-2323017.html

[12] Michael McLaughlin, “Dalai Lama: Humans Created Terrorism, So Stop Praying To God For A Solution”, Huffington Post, November 17, 2015.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dalai-lama-terrorism_564b8975e4b045bf3df16e75

[13] Amie Parnes and Kevin Cirilli, “The $5 billion presidential campaign?” The Hill, January 21, 2016

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/230318-the-5-billion-campaign

[14] Julie Bykowicz, “Campaign ads are a feast for TV stations and they’re out to guard it from online competition”, Associated Press, December 9, 2015

http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2015/12/09/tv-broadcasters-try-to-drum-up-more-campaign-ads

PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR

This is the second of four articles analyzing the new US Department of Defense Law of War Manual. The first article was posted November 3.

The most menacing passages of the Pentagon’s Law of War Manual concern its relationship to other areas of law. According to the manual, the law of war is separate from and supersedes all other bodies of law, including international human rights treaties and the United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights. This is nothing less than a formula for martial law, military dictatorship and the suspension of the Constitution.

Citing a legal treatise entitled “Military Law and Precedents,” the manual states that the law of war can supersede the Constitution: “‘On the actual theatre of military operations,’ as is remarked by a learned judge, ‘the ordinary laws of the land are superseded by the laws of war. The jurisdiction of the civil magistrate is there suspended, and military authority and force are substituted.’ Finding indeed its original authority in the war powers of Congress and the Executive, and thus constitutional in its source, the Law of War may, in its exercise, substantially supersede for the time even the Constitution itself …” (p. 10, emphasis added).

With the entire world declared to be the “battlefield” in the “war on terror,” this is a formula for the Pentagon to impose military dictatorship on all of Planet Earth.

When the Pentagon refers to the “law of war,” it is not referring to historic precedents or international treaties. The phrase “law of war,” in the context of the manual, is a euphemism for “the law according to the Pentagon.”

Under the Pentagon’s pseudo-legal framework, the “law of war” is an independent source of legal authority that overrides all democratic rights and sanctions arbitrary rule by the military. The manual states: “Although the law of war is generally viewed as ‘prohibitive law,’ in some respects, especially in the context of domestic law, the law of war may be viewed as permissive or even as a source of authority” (p. 14).

Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt

Changing a few words here and there, these doctrines could have been copy-pasted from the writings of the Nazi “crown jurist” Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). According to Schmitt’s infamous “state of exception” doctrine, under conditions of a national emergency, the executive is permitted to override democratic protections and disregard the rule of law. Under this doctrine, democratic rights are not formally abrogated, they are simply suspended indefinitely.

Schmitt’s “state of exception” doctrine was used as a legal justification for the 1933 “Act to Relieve the Distress of the People and the Reich,” also known as the “Enabling Act,” which codified Hitler’s dictatorship.

The Pentagon manual invokes Schmitt’s “state of exception” theory in all but name. Having claimed that the law of war is a “special” discipline of law, as opposed to a “general” discipline, the manual states that “the special rule overrides the general law” (p. 9). For added effect, a Latin legal maxim saying the same thing is cited: “lex specialis derogat legi generali.”

Thus, according to the Pentagon, the law of war is the exception to the general “law of peacetime.” Here we have nothing less than a Nazi legal doctrine, incorporated by the Pentagon into a major policy document.

“In some circumstances,” the Pentagon’s manual states, “the rules in the law of war [i.e., the rules invented by the Pentagon] and the rules in human rights treaties may appear to conflict; these apparent conflicts may be resolved by the principle that the law of war is the lex specialis during situations of armed conflict [again, the state of exception], and, as such, is the controlling body of law with regard to the conduct of hostilities and the protection of war victims” (p. 9).

In other words, whenever the Pentagon’s policies conflict with human rights treaties, the human rights treaties should be ignored.

The manual continues, “Underlying this approach is the fact that the law of war is firmly established in customary international law as a well-developed body of law that is separate from the principles of law generally applicable in peace” (p. 10). The implication is that during wartime, America’s vast military establishment is a “separate,” independent branch of government, subject to its own rules and accountable to no one.

Despite the references to the war powers of Congress and the executive under the American Constitution, the Pentagon’s conceptions are the opposite of the framework envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence, in its list of grievances against the British monarch, charges that the king “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”

Both the Bush and Obama administrations have been fond of invoking the phrase “commander in chief,” which appears in Article II of the US Constitution, in a manner that turns its original meaning upside down. The American revolutionaries described the president as the commander in chief of the navy and army as a way of expressing the subordination of the military to civilian authority. This phrase was not meant to elevate the military, with the president as its head, into some kind of supreme authority over the rest of the state and the population.

The manual’s reference to “principles of law generally applicable in peace” has particularly sinister implications.

“Human rights treaties,” according to the Pentagon, are “primarily applicable to the relationship between a State and individuals in peacetime” (p. 22). Therefore, in “wartime”—including the “war on terror” of indefinite scope and duration—human rights treaties no longer apply.

This formula would allow the Pentagon to override more than just human rights treaties. The manual’s authors include the Bill of Rights and other guarantees of civil liberties in the category of laws that apply in “peacetime” only. The arguments made by the manual justify suspending the Bill of Rights altogether as a “peacetime” law that is superseded for the duration of the “war on terror.”

But why stop there? Aren’t elections also part of a system of laws “generally applicable in peace?” What about other civil liberties? What about the right to freedom of speech, or the right to form political parties? What about the right to trial by jury? What about the right to privacy, and the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment?” What about laws against racial discrimination? The right to a minimum wage?

Taken to its logical conclusion, the Law of War Manual would justify imposing a military dictatorship, suspending all democratic rights and rounding up and imprisoning all dissenters.

Should any reader think this analysis far-fetched, it should be remembered that one top American military man recently called for setting up military internment camps for “disloyal” and “radicalized” Americans. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark (a Democrat) declared:

“If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States, as a matter of principle, fine. It’s their right, and it’s our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.”

He added, “We’ve got to cut this off at the beginning.”

Clark’s extraordinary proposals provoked no significant discussion or disagreement within the political or media establishment. None of the current presidential candidates from either major party has referred to Clark’s statement, presumably because they do not fundamentally disagree with it. There have been no consequences for Clark’s lobbying and consulting firm. The Pentagon’s manual makes clear that Clark was merely testing the waters, revealing plans that have been broadly discussed, developed and approved at the highest levels of the state.

Antonin Scalia

When asked last year about the military internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia responded, “You are kidding yourself if you think the same thing won’t happen again.” He added, in a formulation that mirrors the Pentagon’s manual, “In times of war, the law falls silent.”

The manual also features a heavy dose of the Obama administration’s trademark “balancing” rhetoric. Pursuant to this approach, a basic democratic right or legal principle will be affirmed in abstract terms. But then it will be “balanced” against some authoritarian counter-principle, with the result that the basic principle will be rendered meaningless. The Obama administration has invoked this formula repeatedly as its justification for NSA spying, as well as for drone assassinations.

The document states, “Civilians may not be made the object of attack, unless they take direct part in hostilities.” This seems clear enough, but then a “balancing” formula is introduced. “Civilians may be killed incidentally in military operations; however, the expected incidental harm to civilians may not be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage from an attack, and feasible precautions must be taken to reduce the risk of harm to civilians during military operations” (p. 128).

In other words, after applying the “balancing” formula, it turns out that it is acceptable to kill civilians if, on balance, the expected “military advantage” outweighs the harm to civilians. This effectively makes the rule against killing civilians meaningless. In practice, the “balancing” formula translates to the unfettered power of military leaders to order mass killing and destruction.

The brutality of imperialist war

The manual features a chilling discussion of killing civilians. According to the Pentagon, massacres of civilians are permissible if they help achieve “operational objectives.”

The authors take pains not to state that the killing of civilians is prohibited per se. Instead, the manual indicates that “feasible precautions” should be taken to “avoid” civilian casualties, which should not be “excessive” or “unreasonable.” However, the manual defines “feasible precautions” as merely “those that are practicable or practically possible, taking into account all circumstances ruling at the time, including humanitarian and military considerations” (p. 190).

“For example,” the document states,

“if a commander determines that taking a precaution would result in operational risk (i.e., a risk of failing to accomplish the mission) or an increased risk of harm to their own forces, then the precaution would not be feasible and would not be required” (p. 191).

This is a blank check for mass killings of civilians if a military leader decides that failing to do so would be an “operational risk.” If exterminating the population of a hostile city would reduce the “risk of harm” to US forces, then the Pentagon manual would allow it.

This “balancing” formulation appears to contradict previous statements of American policy, such as the following remarks from 1987 by a State Department legal adviser: “[C]ivilian losses are not to be balanced against the military value of the target. If severe losses would result, then the attack is forbidden, no matter how important the target” [2].

The manual also codifies the tendentious “human shields” doctrine, whereby civilian deaths are blamed on the targets of indiscriminate bombing.

“A party that is subject to attack might fail to take feasible precautions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians, such as by separating the civilian population from military objectives … the ability to discriminate and to reduce the risk of harm to the civilian population likely will be diminished by such enemy conduct” (p. 198).

This is merely a justification for collective punishment by another name. If the Pentagon identifies a “military objective” in a densely populated area, then the military supposedly has the legal right to obliterate the neighborhood with high explosives and blame the civilian population for being “human shields.” Collective punishment is, under international law, a war crime. It is designed to terrorize a population and discourage resistance.

The manual expressly authorizes targeted killings. “Military operations may be directed against specific enemy combatants,” the document states, adding, “US forces have often conducted such operations” (p. 201).

In support of targeted killings, the manual cites Obama’s speech on May 2, 2011:

“Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound [suspected of housing Osama Bin Laden] in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body” (p. 201).

The manual fails to mention that journalist Seymour Hersh has exposed the account given in Obama’s speech as a pack of lies.

Censorship and targeting of journalists as “unprivileged belligerents”

The manual’s proposed treatment of journalists as spies has evoked the only media attention to the document. “Reporting on military operations,” the manual states, “can be very similar to collecting intelligence or even spying” (p. 175).

The Pentagon goes on to authorize itself to “capture” and “punish” journalists, forbid journalists to work anonymously, and require that journalists obtain “permission” and “identification documents” from the US military to conduct their work.

The manual states:

“A journalist who acts as a spy may be subject to security measures and punished if captured. To avoid being mistaken for spies, journalists should act openly and with the permission of relevant authorities. Presenting identification documents, such as the identification card issued to authorized war correspondents or other appropriate identification, may help journalists avoid being mistaken as spies” (p. 175).

The document further states that journalists can be subject to military censorship. It declares:

“States may need to censor journalists’ work or take other security measures so that journalists do not reveal sensitive information to the enemy. Under the law of war, there is no special right for journalists to enter a State’s territory without its consent or to access areas of military operations without the consent of the State conducting those operations” (p. 175).

There is nothing here that would be out of place in the code of laws of a totalitarian police state. This legal framework, for example, would justify setting up a military internment camp to imprison each journalist who published material disclosed by Edward Snowden. There is nothing in the manual that would prohibit the Pentagon from launching drone strikes against targeted journalists who are deemed to be acting as “spies.” (If a journalist’s family and friends were killed in the drone strike, it would be the journalist’s fault for employing “human shields”).

Do we exaggerate? An article appeared in the recent spring/summer issue of the academic National Security Law Journal titled “Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict/Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column” [3 Nat’l Sec. L.J. 278 (2015)]. In this article, West Point law professor William C. Bradford argues that academics who criticize the “war on terror” are “aiding the enemy,” such that they should be treated as “unlawful combatants” under the law of war.

Bradford, a professor at the prestigious United States Military Academy, goes on to argue that by criticizing the war on terror, certain professors are working in “the service of Islamists seeking to destroy Western civilization and re-create the Caliphates.” These professors, Bradford charges, are guilty of “skepticism of executive power,” “professional socialization,” “pernicious pacifism,” and “cosmopolitanism.”

Bradford recommends firing “disloyal” professors and imposing loyalty oaths at universities. He further recommends arresting and prosecuting professors for treason and for providing material support to terrorism. Finally, he argues that “disloyal” professors and the universities that employ them could be considered “lawful targets” for military attack under the law of war.

Bradford has also advocated a military coup (“What conditions precedent would be required before the American military would be justified in using or threatening force to oust a US president…?”) and genocide (“total war” until “the political will of Islamist peoples” is broken, or until “all who countenance or condone Islamism are dead”). The latter policy would include the targeted destruction of “Islamic holy sites.”

The journal subsequently repudiated Bradford’s article, calling it an “egregious breach of professional decorum,” and Bradford resigned from West Point on August 30. However, the episode provides a glimpse of what the Pentagon has in mind for its critics under the “law of war.” Bradford’s fascistic rants simply represent the doctrines expressed in the Law of War Manual taken to their logical conclusions.

The persecution of journalists such as Glenn Greenwald (and his partner David Miranda) and Julian Assange, together with whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Bradley (Chelsea) Manning, has already made clear that the American government will treat the exposure of official criminality as “espionage” and “aiding the enemy.” The Pentagon’s manual codifies this position and authorizes the military to carry out repressive measures against journalists.

The Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) issued a statement on July 31 protesting the manual, pointing to the rising numbers of journalists killed and maimed while covering armed conflicts. “The Obama administration’s Defense Department,” the CPJ wrote, “appears to have taken the ill-defined practices begun under the Bush administration during the War on Terror and codified them to formally govern the way US military forces treat journalists covering conflicts.”

It is significant that the words “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press” do not appear anywhere in the Pentagon’s manual.

In a section setting forth the Pentagon’s authority as an “Occupying Power,” the manual states that “for the purposes of security, an Occupying Power may establish regulation of any or all forms of media (e.g., press, radio, television) and entertainment (e.g., theater, movies), of correspondence, and of other means of communication. For example, an Occupying Power may prohibit entirely the publication of newspapers that pose a threat to security, or it may prescribe regulations for the publication or circulation of newspapers of other media for the purpose of fulfilling its obligations to restore public order” (pp. 759-60).

A footnote includes the caveat that “this sub-section focuses solely on what is permitted under the law of war and does not address possible implications of censorship under the First Amendment of the Constitution.” Presumably, the authors would contend that the First Amendment applies only in “peacetime,” and is “superseded” by the Pentagon’s “lex specialis” for the duration of the “war on terror.”

Notes:

[2] See The Position of the United States on Current Law of War Agreements: Remarks of Judge Abraham D. Sofaer, Legal Adviser, United States Department of State, Jan. 22, 1987, American University Journal of International Law and Policy 460, 468 (1987) (cited in the Law of War Manual, p. 247).

“It is the terrorism that threatens our freedom today. It is not the state of emergency. I repeat: the state of emergency does not mean the abandonment of the rule of law. We are fighting terrorism, and we will defeat it, with the arms of the Republic, of democracy, with the strength of our values, our principles and our republican principles of law.” So said the smooth-talking French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve (image left) on December 2, 2015 before announcing the results of the “exceptional measures” permitted by the state of emergency, taking care not to specify, for the some 10% of searches that would have led to seizures, detainment and/or legal actions, how many of them were actually related to terrorism. 

It was revealed since that almost all seizures and indictments concerned offenses and crimes very far from planning acts of terror and/or “radical Islam” – such as drug trafficking, banditry, etc., and to date, despite the thousands of wrecked homes, the places of worship desecrated and above all the countless innocent lives left traumatized or even ruined, no “terrorist” has been arrested, no “cell” has been dismantled. A resounding failure in all, at least if one considers that this is indeed, first and foremost, about fight against terrorism, which all the same requires a strong dose of credulity.

In 1990, in his novel Le Bouclage (The Sealing Off), Vladimir Volkoff [1] had already described such methods: impose on a whole “sensitive” neighbourhood a state of siege, intern and file its people and search their homes from top to bottom, on the pretext of an imminent terrorist attack, which will be “heroically” foiled by the elimination of a criminal organization that was under longstanding close surveillance, but which the location and neutralization of will retroactively constitute the official pretext for the entire operation. It will allow the imprisonment of some offenders previously elusive through legal channels, and above all to summon the entire population to the due veneration towards the Nation, Order and Security. A dastardly plot of which the author, a visceral anticommunist and Islamophobe and flatterer of American imperialism, seemingly a supporter of torture, openly monarchist, was a proselyte, but our current government has clearly seen the wider picture and extended its Gestapo measures to the whole territory, in addition to having established them for an absolutely senseless term – and one that is indefinitely renewable.

The fight against the terrorism of Daesh, which our country [France] openly allied itself to in Syria and before that in Libya, is clearly a pretext to restrict the freedoms and force terror on the population, to silence any “dissident” voices, any political or social protest.

And of course, Muslims and descendants of immigrants as a whole are a primary target, either to destroy what remains of their “foreign” culture or to woo voters of the far-right National Front. Especially as in order to create a “Sacred Union”, a common enemy can act as a political project, and the more spectacular the acts and measures, the harder it will be for the masses to reflect and consider.

All these measures are obviously another attempt of the most discredited government in the history of the French Republic to improve its image, legitimately and irreparably tarnished, but through which we can perceive – and this is the only thing that can reassure us – the convulsive spasms of an agony foreseen to be devastating.

“…It’s doing a good job in France too!” (Al-Baghdadi)

On Jan.5, the Yemeni army and popular forces loyal to the Houthi movement thwarted an attempt by the Saudi-led coalition’s forces to enter Yemen from the Jizan province through the border crossing of Tawwal. According to the reports,  both sides suffered causalities.

The clashes in this area have been especially heavy since the Houthi alliance captured the villages of Khobe, Qarn and Sahabakh inside the Jizan region of Saudi Arabia on Jan.4. The several coalition combatants were also killed.

The Saudi military base in the Alhajleh region of Najran province came under the Houthi forces’ attack. The pro-Yemeni sources argue that the Houthi forces killed tens of Saudi military servicemen and captured the military base.

In a separate development, the Houthis captured the village of Al-Huwaymi in the Al-Lajh province in Southern Yemen. Now, the Houthi forces are advancing to the town of Kirsh.

The Saudi Air Force launched a number of airstrikes over the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on Tuesday morning. Over 40 civilians were killed and wounded and several civilian sites were damaged. Separately, the Saudi warplanes conducted air raids in the Yemeni province of Sa’ada.

On Jan.5, Hassan Hamoud Uqlan, a known field commander of ISIS in the Tha’bat district of Ta’izz Province was killed in the clashes with fighters of the Houthi movement and military units. Openly, ISIS controls only separate areas in Yemen, however, a significant incensement of the terrorist group’s activity have been observed since the start of the Saudi-led coalition’s military operations in the country.

On the 3rd of January, before the blood of Saudi executed Sheikh Nimr had even dried, Ex Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford (pictured left) tweeted this appalling piece of leading propaganda: 

Link to Tweet

This must firstly be compared to an equally insensitive and cynical propagandist, profiteering tweet from arch lie merchant, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch. This dreadful piece of exploitative cynicism was subsequently deleted, perhaps after even Ken Roth realised he had overstepped the mark of decency.  This was Ken Roth’s attempt to overshadow the US bombing of the MSF hospital in Kunduz with further tired and universally discredited anti Assad propaganda.

I guess in Robert Ford’s favour he waited 24 hours before his display of disrespect towards a much loved and respected activist and campaigner against the Saudi regime’s despotism and brutality, supported of course by its Western cohorts.

Ken Roth on the other hand, could barely contain his excitement at being able to find another opportunity to attack Assad personally, tweeting his little gem on the same day as the US had relentlessly bombed one of the few remaining hospitals in Kunduz for over an hour.  30 people including nursing staff, patients and doctors were massacred, 37 injured in one of the worst incidents of civilian casualties in the 14-year war  by US forces seemingly oblivious to their screams for help and for the onslaught to stop.

It appears that disseminating fake information on Syria took priority over highlighting the US gross negligence and violations of rules of war.

Of course we cannot ignore the fact that Ford is watching US and NATO [Israeli and GCC] plans for regime change in Syria floundering irreparably.  Sheikh Nimr’s execution was a desperate and appalling attempt to revive a Western/Saudi  engineered sectarian conflict that is being thwarted by Syria’s innate secularism and the unity of the majority of the Syrian people behind a President who has emerged from the eye of the almost 5 year  propaganda storm, as a symbol of resilience and unflappable dignity.

“As with Sheikh Zakzaky in Nigeria, Sheikh Nimr campaigned against the Saudi Wahhabi distortion of Islam and engineered division of the Muslim world along sectarian lines that did not exist prior to the Saudi propaganda, inflamed and fuelled by the West intent on partitioning the region to best serve Israel’s security and Western economic and resource agendas,” Vanessa Beeley, with Syrian Solidarity Movement, told Tasnim on Monday.

“From the reaction of certain US Congress representatives such as Robert Ford to the hideous execution of Sheikh Nimr Bagher al-Nimr by the despotic Saudi regime, it is clear that the Sheikh’s execution is a reaction to the US NATO floundering regime change policies in Syria,” she added.

“The US is determined to maintain perpetual sectarian conflict and anyone who dares to evoke unity and cohesion will not be tolerated.  Will this bring more extremism to the region?  Iran is more intelligent than this as is Russia.  Both countries have been sorely provoked and both are showing huge restraint and wisdom, unlike their antagonists,” Beeley said.

Now a little reminder about Robert Ford’s close relationship with “moderate rebel” FSA [Free Syrian Army] Colonel Okaidi.

Twitter Link 

One of the most senior “moderate” rebel commanders to be backed by the US and main recipient of Western aid, Col. Okaidi, is seen in a video, which has been authenticated by Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma, speaking during interviews saying “My relationship with the brothers in ISIL is good … I communicate almost daily with brothers in ISIL … the relationship is good, even brotherly.”

Okaidi admits al-Qaida is not any different from the FSA: “They [al-Nusra] did not exhibit any abnormal behavior, which is different from that of the FSA.”

The video shows Okaidi with ISIS Emir Abu Jandal celebrating a victory, as an ally ISIS fighter shouts “I swear to Allah, O Alawites, we came to slaughter you. Await what you deserve!”

US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who worked closely with Okaidi, himself admitted to giving material support to ISIS and al-Nusra, stating that he “absolutely does not deny” knowing that most of the rebels he backed fought alongside ISIS and al-Nusra ~ Steve Chovanec for Mint Press News

In response to Robert Ford’s tweet on Sheikh Nimr, I tweeted Camille Alexandre Otrakji‘s excellent article contesting  Ambassador Ford‘s analysis of the US intervention in Syria.

“The United States has the power to shape narratives around the globe … it has the power to name villains and heroes … it can decide who is on the right side of history and who is not.

Then it can promote the ones that it blessed while building international coalitions to punish the ones it condemned to the wrong side.

Usually it also punishes their people and their countries and sometimes neighboring countries, in the process… collateral damage … the price for freedom …

It is all done is a slick style that the narrative-building machine describes as “Justice” and “protecting the people” or “the price they need to pay to gain their freedom”, rather than the more impulsive or selfish motivators: “teaching them a lesson they won’t forget” or “protecting America’s interests (oil and defense sectors usually).”  ~  excerpt from Camille Otrakji’s article. 

This article seemed to cause sufficient consternation for Robert Ford to divert me to Direct [private] message on Twitter.  The following is the unedited conversation I had with Ford.

Ford:  Vanessa – rather than put a tweet out to thousands, in answer to your question, I do remember Camille’s long piece. I agreed with some of it. Some of it badly distorted things I had said and misinterpreted American policy and some of it ignored realities on the ground and what the Syrian government does. I wrote him a long response last spring. You can ask him to share it if he wants. I note that he didn’t publish it on his FB page, but that’s his right

Vanessa: Um did you not just tweet to thousands, utterly incorrect statistics from Syria. According to you Assad personally killed 200,000. That is a barefaced lie even by the US Government standards and to state that in conjunction with the heinous execution of Sheikh Nimr without even including his title out of respect for this visionary man of peace and unity and with no reference to the continuing policy of execution both in Saudi Arabia and globally by their Frankenstein monsters that your Government helped create..you are the propagandist sir, Camille’s article is at least well researched. Your statement is a lie, that we have all stopped believing.

You saw the execution of a Saudi Muslim faith leader and opposition speaker against the despotic Saudi regime as an opportunity for propaganda, both against Syria and Iran..shame on you. Where is your respect?

All figures coming out of Syria are skewed by your propagandists on the ground and you know that. Where are the figures on the US Coalition bombing civilian deaths in Syria? Al Bab, Aleppo bombing of civilians covered up by Congress. Where are the figures for the “rebel” mortar victims in Damascus and Homs & across Syria, the “mod reb” suicide bomb attacks across Syria, the “moderate rebel” snipers, the “rebel” hell cannon attacks in Aleppo? When are they ever mentioned by your pet UKFO CIA/Soros propagandists, aka the White Helmets?

Ford:  i take my figures from the syrian network for human rights which has activists inside syria and which documents victims by name. their estimates are lower than the syrian observatory. both have detailed reports on the internet that you can check if you wish. if you have more accurate data than these 2 organizations do, well, let’s see it. and where is your respect for the hundreds of thousands of victims of the assad regime? sheikh nimr was one man. i have a colleague who once met him and said he appeared reasonable. but i also regret more the death of many thousands of civilians. and i make no apologies for that.

Vanessa: If the SNHR is so reliable why has the UN stopped documenting victim figures from Syria because information from on the ground is so unreliable?

I presume, if they record names, you will have all 200, 000 names that you are claiming Assad killed?

Who are the activists supplying this information? Are they part of the agitprop shop set up by Avaaz in 2011 that included that bastion of truth, Danny Abdul Dayem and many other such embarrassing fakers..or the Syria Civil Defence, proven CIA/UKFO backed agents, embedded in Al Nusra and ISIS areas and allied with these terrorist factions against the Syrian people.

I can demonstrate SNHR connections to Governmental agencies with a vested interest in Syria regime change, the SOHR has been universally discredited.

You have failed to answer my question, where are the figures for the casualties of your proxy terrorist armies and gangs in Syria? Where are the figures of the mortar maimed and dead, fired by your “moderate rebels” into civilian areas? Where are your figures of civilians killed by your Coalition bombs or the essential infrastructure destruction by your bombs that ensures the starvation and privation of the Syrian people? Where are your figures for the SAA who make up the majority of the victims of this war on Syria, and they are the Syrian people.

And your comment about Sheikh Nimr is a blatant and woeful example of American exceptionalism..your colleague’s opinion of this courageous leader outweighs that of his tens of thousands of supporters and followers across the world.

I have respect for the Syrian civilians who are losing their lives and enduring the horror inflicted upon them by your terror gangs and “moderate rebels”, I have respect for those raped, crucified, tortured, shelled, bombed and torn apart by these monsters you have unleashed upon Syria. You are right I have, not one iota of respect for one of those terrorist lives lost. Nor should you!

They say silence speaks volumes….

In reality Ford is trying to play ‘neutral’ and a ‘good guy’ but still clinging to the Western script of events which is falling apart at the seams on a daily basis.

History alone will show what an awful debacle this plot against Syria has been.  It will take a few years for the true version of events to be accepted as “consensus reality” but that time will come.

The West took a side, moulded it , embellished it and armed it and it was not the side of the Syrian people.  The “rebels” such as they were did a deal with the Devil and brought the made-in-the-West  Devil to Syria on promises of money, status and a seat at the table of power when the “regime” change was completed. Both are seeing their agendas being dismantled before their eyes and both sides are making fatal mistakes in their propaganda efforts.

This is the neocolonial dance.  Merciless exposure of their fraudulence and disinformation campaign is needed to ensure they stumble into oblivion.

May the soul of the courageous Sheikh Nimr rest in Peace and may his legacy of unity and resistance against oppression live on through all of us.

The United States’ 20 wealthiest people (The 0.000006 Percent) now own more wealth than the bottom half of the U.S. population combined, a total of 152 million people in 57 million households. The Forbes 400 now own about as much wealth as the nation’s entire African-American population — plus more than a third of the Latino population — combined; more wealth combined than the bottom 61 percent of the U.S. population, an estimated 194 million people or 70 million households.

These stats are from the Middle Ages and also from the Institute for Policy Studies which acknowledges that much wealth is hidden offshore and the reality is likely even worse.

What did those 20 wealthiest, most meritorious people do to deserve such disgusting riches? The group includes four Wal-Mart heirs, three Mars candy heirs, and two Koch brother heirs. They earned their wealth by being born to wealthy parents, just like some who want to work for them, such as Donald Trump. One politician is actually one of them: Michael Bloomberg.

These individuals could fund a total shift to clean energy or end starvation on earth or eradicate diseases. That they choose not to is murderous and shameful. It’s not their sacred right. It’s not cute. And it’s not funny when one of them pretends to give his money away by giving it to himself.

The 0.000006 Percent has a tight grip on the media as well, with Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post and Amazon, Sheldon Adelson buying newspapers, Mark Zuckerberg owning Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin with Google, Warren Buffet owning whole chains of newspapers, and again Bloomberg with Bloomberg News.

In the first phase of the 2016 Presidential election cycle, according to the New York Times, 158 wealthy donors provided half of all campaign contributions, 138 of them backing Republicans, 20 backing Democrats. No candidate can easily compete without huge amounts of money. And if you get it from small donors, as Bernie Sanders has done the most of, you’ll be largely shut out of free media coverage, and belittled in the bit of coverage you’re granted. The media coverage, the debate questions, and the topics discussed are determined by the interests of the wealthy in this national oligarchy.

Then there’s the corrupt foundation money and speaking fees flowing into the Clinton family from wealthy sources in the U.S. and abroad. While most Americans are unable to sit through a full presidential debate, Wall Street, Big Pharma, and corporate technology interests have shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars supposedly just to hear Hillary or Bill Clinton speak.

According to a new report by Consortium News, Hillary Clinton took in $11.8 million in 51 speaking fees between January 2014 to May 2015. Bill Clinton delivered 53 paid speeches to bring in $13.3 million during that same period. That’s over $25 million total, largely if not entirely from wealthy parties with a strong interest in influencing U.S. government policy.

This system of rewarding former politicians is one of the great corrupting forces in Washington, DC, but the revolving door that brings such politicians back into power makes it many times worse.

According to the Washington Post, since 1974 the Clintons have raised at least $3 billion, including at least $69 million just from the employees and PACs of banks, insurance companies, and securities and investment firms.

According to the International Business Times, the Clintons’ foundation took in money from foreign nations while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, nations such as Saudi Arabia for which she then waived restrictions on U.S. weapons sales. (Also on that list: Algeria, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar.) I brought this up on a recent television program, and one of the other guests protested that I was not, at that moment, criticizing Donald Trump. But, even if we assume Trump is the worst person on earth, what has he done that is worse than taking a bribe to supply Saudi Arabia with the weapons that have since been used to slaughter children in Yemen? And what does Trump have to do with bribery? He’s self-corrupted. He’s in the race because of the financial barrier keeping decent people out. But he hasn’t been bribed to act like a fascist.

The Wall Street Journal reports that during the same period, Bill Clinton was bringing in big speaking fees from companies, groups, and a foreign government with interests in influencing the U.S. State Department. Eight-digit donors to the Clintons’ foundations include Saudi Arabia and Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Seven digit donors include: Kuwait, Exxon Mobil, Friends of Saudi Arabia, James Murdoch (son of Rupert), Qatar, Boeing, Dow, Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart and the United Arab Emirates. Those chipping in at least half a million include Bank of America, Chevron, Monsanto, Citigroup, and the Soros Foundation. And they don’t even get a speech!

Sign this petition:
We urge the Clintons to clear their corrupted image by donating their $25 million in recent lecture fees to organizations legitimately working for campaign finance reform, Wall Street reform, environmental protection, and peace.

Watch this video.

Millions of lives are at risk from violence, starvation, lack of vital medical care, and overall deprivation.

A new UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) report downplayed the ongoing catastrophe, undercounting civilian casualties since conflict began last March.

It’s likely in the tens of thousands from Saudi terror-bombing heavily populated areas and absence of vital essentials to life.

Claiming it’s only 2,800, another 5,200 wounded mocks the unbearable suffering of millions of Yemenis, victims of US imperialism.

The world community remains largely indifferent, ignoring an entire population at risk. Millions may perish before conflict ends. Nothing is being done to prevent it.

Fighting shows no signs of abating. Obama’s orchestrated war complicit with Riyadh is another high crime on his rap sheet, major media scoundrels giving it short shrift.

Famine stalks Yemen, around 20 million at risk, children, the ill and elderly most vulnerable. War without mercy continues.

Secure sources of food, potable water, fuel, electricity and medical care are absent or in too short supply in most of the country – impossible conditions to survive for many.

Malnutrition is rampant, near-starvation commonplace. So are preventable diseases claiming unknown numbers of lives for lack of treatment. Body counts exclude nonviolent deaths.

A phantom mid-December ceasefire ended in the new year. Saudis escalated terror-bombing US selected targets, including densely populated residential areas, hospitals, refugee camps, vital infrastructure and other non-military sites.

A blockade remains in force, preventing vital to life essentials from getting to people in need in amounts enough to matter.

Washington and Riyadh want war, not peace. Ceasefire was more illusion than reality – Houthis irresponsibly blamed for imperial crimes. Yemenis continue suffering horrifically.

Their country is being systematically ravaged and destroyed – increasingly looking like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

US imperialism bears full responsibility, destroying life on earth one country at a time, making things unbearable for survivors.

Last September, a largely Saudi-drafted (US/UK supported) UN Human Rights Council resolution on Yemen excluded an independent international war crimes investigation, whitewashing imperial high crimes.

It authorized only UN provided technical assistance to a Yemeni inquiry headed by illegitimate president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi – US-installed in a 2012 election with no opposing candidates.

Yemen remains a black hole of endless violence and instability, no relief in sight for its suffering millions.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs. 

The showdown between armed ranchers and federal agents in the US state of Oregon has triggered passionate debates not only about the particulars of the standoff itself, but the precise manner in which people should stand up against an increasingly overbearing government and the corporate-financier special interests that have commandeered it.

Wall Street and Washington have left the country itself in socioeconomic shambles. Abroad, these collective special interests are subverting nations politically and economically from Venezuela to Southeast Asia, waging war throughout North Africa and the Middle East, while propping up criminal client regimes in nations like Ukraine.

A handful of armed ranchers with a few boxes of supplies, who live within and are completely dependent on a system controlled by the very special interests they are standing up against, will do little to change the military, economic, political, and social factors that add up to the above described global equation.

The ranchers’ supply cache looks like it was picked up from one of America’s many mega-retailers, the literal consumerist feeding troughs that keep the American people perpetually in servile dependence, and the Fortune 500 deeply entrenched amid the unwarranted power and influence it has enjoyed for decades and is able to wield at home and abroad with virtual impunity.

It is not unlike a group of American G.I.’s trying to fight the Germans during WW2, while buying German rations, from the Germans, all while leaving German supply lines completely intact. They would not only be preserving their enemy’s source of strength to fight, but paying into it. The harder they “fought” the more supplies they would need, and the stronger their enemy would become.

The ranchers’ standoff, from a purely strategic point-of-view, is already a failure. No matter who is really behind it, and no matter how it plays out, the actions of the ranchers at best will cause the government to back down on this one particular issue, and only for this particular case At worse, it will only further justify the growing police state evolving within America’s borders. Regardless, it will do absolutely nothing to change the balance of power enabling Wall Street and Washington at home or abroad.

How to Fight Tyranny 

A growing tyranny is not entirely unlike an insurgency. The terms insurgency and counterinsurgency can quickly become confusing in a politically motivated context. However, generally speaking, an insurgency seeks to overthrow an established institution or political order, while a counterinsurgency seeks to maintain that order.

In the United States, and around much of the world where the nation-state still prevails, the established order is one of national sovereignty based on constitutions and charters produced by each respective nation, with an infrastructure built and improved upon over generations by each nation’s respective cultures, economic activities, and innovations. From a nation’s national courts and military, all the way down to the individual family, these are the established institutions of one’s nation.

Image: The problem goes beyond the various government agencies that torment us, be it land departments perceived to be harassing ranchers, or police perceived to be harassing African-Americans, and stems from the unwarranted power and influence the government wields due to the corporate-financier interests that have commandeered it to serve its own interests. A few guns and a box of supplies bought at Walmart will not solve a problem that, ironically, includes Walmart.

There is an insurgency to subvert all of this. A global corporate-financier insurgency, or simply a “corporate-insurgency.”

The corporate-insurgency seeks to subvert our institutions, starting with the family, extending to our schools, universities, churches, temples and mosques, our local sheriff, and even reaching into our national governments, rewriting or eradicating altogether our national constitutions and charters. It has, to a great extent, already subverted our independent local infrastructure, while implementing laws and regulations to prevent us from restoring it. We have the very tactics described in a vast library of government and military counterinsurgency documents being employed against us, where ever we are and to a profound effect.

“Insurgency is the organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify or challenge political control of a region. As such, it is primarily a political struggle, in which both sides use armed force to create space for their political, economic and influence activities to be effective. Insurgency is not always conducted by a single group with a centralized, military-style command structure, but may involve a complex matrix of different actors with various aims, loosely connected in dynamic and non-hierarchical networks. To be successful, insurgencies require charismatic leadership, supporters, recruits, supplies, safe havens and funding (often from illicit activities). They only need the active support of a few enabling individuals, but the passive acquiescence of a large proportion of the contested population will give a higher probability of success. This is best achieved when the political cause of the insurgency has strong appeal, manipulating religious, tribal or local identity to exploit common societal grievances or needs. Insurgents seek to gain control of populations through a combination of persuasion, subversion and coercion while using guerrilla tactics to offset the strengths of government security forces. Their intent is usually to protract the struggle, exhaust the government and win sufficient popular support to force capitulation or political accommodation. Consequently, insurgencies evolve through a series of stages, though the progression and outcome will be different in almost every case.” – page 7 U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide, 2009 (emphasis added)

While this above quote is a most accurate description of an insurgency, as one reads the US Government Counterinsurgency Guide (2009), they will realize that the opposing methods of counterinsurgency itself involve all of these same factors, simply mirrored and reflecting the interests of the US versus the interests of targeted “insurgencies.”

Image: The cover of the US Government Counterinsurgency Guide (2009) features the signatures representing the trifecta of modern day empire, covert operations (USAID), military force (Department of Defense), and system administration (the State Department). COIN describes the methods by which empire is implemented at a grassroots

As a matter of fact, what is described by the 2009 counterinsurgency (COIN) guide, is an accurate description of how political control has been achieved and maintained by all governments throughout the entirety of human history – it also forms the foundation of modern empire.

This includes an enumerated list of services, institutions, organizations, and processes that must be controlled in order to establish political, tactical, and economic primacy. Without these, counterinsurgency fails. Without these, any political movement seeking to assert itself over a flawed or failing system, fails. 

USMC Counterinsurgency FM 3-24.

While FM 3-24 deals with an armed insurgency, presumably in a foreign country, the basic concepts can and are applied to the relatively peaceful execution of real political power throughout the world as well. The reason why so many well-intentioned political solutions fall short, is because they are tailored without understanding these basic concepts.

1. Establishing Essential Services

When attempting to establish political primacy – essential services, basic infrastructure, economic development and administration must all be controlled by the counterinsurgency. It is upon these basic aspects of modern society that people depend, and from which popular support is sustainably derived. Strength in arms alone will fail utterly unless these aspects are secured, controlled, and developed properly.

Upon page 117, the manual discusses the establishment or restoration of essential services. It states specifically (emphasis added):

Any goal, no matter how well-planned, noble, or progressive, cannot be achieved before these basic services are established and capable of being sustainably maintained. The military is a highly trained, disciplined, well organized institution capable of developing, maintaining, as well as protecting these services. In our local communities around the world, we have to ask ourselves how we can similarly develop and maintain these services sustainably.

Community gardens, farmers’ markets, alternative energy and energy cooperatives, and many other local initiatives shift the power and influence centralized governments and corporate-financier special interests enjoy, away from their monopolies and toward our local communities. Communities that no longer dependent on these special interests are less likely to support them and more likely to defend vigorously infrastructure they are directly invested in.

Image: Local energy cooperatives – maybe not as exciting as a shootout with the Feds, but definitely more constructive and unlike a shootout with the Feds, will actually leave the balance of power tipped slightly greater in the people’s favor…

The task is not entirely as daunting as it may seem. Local communities around the world accomplish this through a combination of traditional and newly created local institutions. Most local communities around the world operate with the added advantage that the corporate-insurgency they face is low-intensity and generally not armed. For prospective activists, auditing what their communities already possess, and how to develop it to be more organized and effective would be a good first step.

Some other initial priorities identified by the manual include the following taken from page 122:

Many communities already possess the ability to do these activities on their own. Points such as “building an indigenous local security force” might translate into efforts to empower local sheriff offices to negate intrusive, unconstitutional federal government control. It might also include the establishment of professional neighborhood watches and shooting clubs where responsible gun ownership is taught – not only to gun enthusiasts, but inclusively to community demographics not traditionally associated with firearm ownership.

Building and improving schools might translate into expanding and improving local home schooling networks, leveraging freely available open-courseware online, and opening after-school tutoring centers giving remedial classes or teaching trades and skills not taught at existing educational institutions.

Image: Growing food organically, locally, undermines big-ag and big-retail. It also redistributes wealth not through government programs that breed dependency amongst the population, but through local entrepreneurship where people directly participate in and benefitfromproductiveeconomicactivity.

Ultimately, most communities are not faced with absolute destitution. For the most part, basic services exist. The problem really is that these services are carried out in some cases by “corporate-insurgents” and play an essential role in building legitimacy and a support base dependent on the corporate-insurgency for these services. Therefore, the goal should be to take ownership over the execution of these basic services which can be done as a community effort or as a local, small business. The precept of “boycott and replace” is the equivalent of the “take, hold, and rebuild” doctrine in military “nation-building” and counterinsurgency.

2. Economic Development 

On page 119 of the report, it states the importance of expanding on basic services and supporting economic development. It states specifically:

The short-term aspect concerns immediate problems, such as large-scale unemployment and reestablishing an economy at all levels. The long-term aspect involves stimulating indigenous, robust, and broad economic activity. The stability a nation enjoys is often related to its people’s economic situation and its adherence to the rule of law. However, a nation’s economic health also depends on its government’s ability to continuously secure its population.

Planning economic development requires understanding the society, culture, and operational environment. For example, in a rural society, land ownership and the availability of agricultural equipment, feed, and fertilizer may be the chief parts of any economic development plan. In an urban, diversified society, the availability of jobs and the infrastructure to support commercial activities may be more important. Except for completely socialist economies, governments do not create jobs other than in the public bureaucracy.However, the micro economy can be positively stimulated by encouraging small businesses development. Jump-starting small businesses requires micro finance in the form of some sort of banking activities [now easily done via crowd funding]. So then, supporting economic development requires attention to both the macro economy and the micro economy.

Without a viable economy and employment opportunities, the public is likely to pursue false promises offered by insurgents. Sometimes insurgents foster the conditions keeping the economy stagnant. Insurgencies attempt to exploit a lack of employment or job opportunities to gain active and passive support for their cause and ultimately undermine the government’s legitimacy. Unemployed males of military age may join the insurgency to provide for their families. Hiring these people for public works projects or a local civil defense corps can remove the economic incentive to join the insurgency.

The report then goes on to list the major categories of economic activity that it implies are essential for the counterinsurgency to control:

Clearly all of these industries are dominated by corporate-financier special interests and their “corporate-insurgency.” One need not stretch their imagination here to see how the economic crisis created by corporate-financier interests across the West and spreading around the world is comparable to the sort of economic challenges facing a post-war nation fighting an armed insurgency.

Image: Through crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, local communities can “jump-start” local businesses and their local economies without banking monopolies being involved or possessing leverage over the community long after loans are granted.

The description and redresses described on page 119 are particularly relevant, and if we consider the corporate-financier interests who have overtaken our government and institutions as the insurgency, we must see it within ourselves and our communities to search for the energy and initiative to begin local economic development.

And again, where the military possesses the ability and the resources to do this on their own, or with other government institutions assisting – local communities must develop their own institutions to accomplish these same goals themselves. Hackerspaces and farmers’ markets represent two organized efforts to develop economic opportunities locally, and present viable models that can be expanded into other industries.

3. Logistics

An entire section of the counterinsurgency field manual is dedicated to logistics. The importance of managing logistical lines not only enable an army to conduct counterinsurgency operations efficiently, but deny the insurgency supplies to conduct their operations. As it is pointed out, throughout history, insurgencies many times supply themselves off of carelessly protected counterinsurgency supply lines.

The report states on page 169 (emphasis added):

Insurgents have a long history of exploiting their enemies’ lines of communications as sources of supply. During the Revolutionary War, American forces significantly provisioned themselves from the British Army’s overindulgent and carelessly defended logistic tail. In the 1930s, Mao Zedong codified a doctrine for insurgency logistics during the fight against the Japanese occupation of China. Without exaggerating, Mao stated, “We have a claim on the output of the arsenals of [our enemies],…and, what is more, it is delivered to us by the enemy’s transport corps. This is the sober truth, it is not a jest.” For Mao’s forces, his enemy’s supply trains provided a valuable source of supply. Mao believed the enemy’s rear was the guerrillas’ front; the guerrillas’ advantage was that they had no discernable logistic rear… 

…For these reasons, forces conducting counterinsurgency operations must protect all potential supplies. Forces must also vigorously protect their lines of communications, scrupulously collect and positively control dud munitions and access to other convertible materiel, and actively seek ways to separate insurgents from black market activities. 

The corporate-insurgency’s logistical lines are particularly easily to compromise – that is because we the people are their logistical lines. Corporate-financier special interests and the government they have constructed to serve them, sustains itself from the collective patronage of communities around the world failing to develop local institutions, services, and economies, and instead pay into centralized, monopolizing multinational corporations. By boycotting and replacing these multinational corporations,we cut the corporate-insurgency off entirely from its logistical lines, starving it into submission.

But just as the USMC COIN manual implores counterinsurgency planners to secure their logistical lines from pilfering insurgents, the corporate-insurgency uses laws and regulations to protect their lines.

Image: The Oregon ranchers’ supply lines appear to lead right to Walmart’s front door. Resistance against Wall Street that pays into Wall Street to sustain itself is doomed to fail before it even begins.

Laws and regulations are designed to prevent independent local institutions, services, and economies from springing up and competing directly with the corporate-insurgency. Farmers in America have been fighting laws seeking to disrupt and regulate out of business, local farmer’s markets. Similar laws in regards to “intellectual property rights” seek to stifle the emergence of independent technological innovation and personal manufacturing. Understanding the greater implications of these laws should provide us a greater impetus to organize and find the means of circumventing them.

For local communities organizing against the corporate-insurgency, our “supplies” consist of our food and water, our electricity, our means of communication, and many others. To secure these, we must assume ownership over them, maintaining them as a collective common or a small, local business. To organize against the corporate-insurgency when we are still dependent on them for even simple things like food and water, is a recipe for instant and repeated failure.

4. Communications

In a very literal sense, a local community’s communications include telephone networks, the Internet, and radio. Like many other aspects of fighting the corporate-insurgency, the low-intensity nature of it affords us the ability to piecemeal boycott and replace various aspects of its power structure without disrupting the lives of people in our local community.

Often times, alternatives are more appealing than existing, monopolized options, and enhance rather than disrupt the lives of ordinary people.

In terms of communication infrastructure, ad hoc wireless networks could be constructed to connect a local Internet. This is already being done by the US State Department to infiltrate and overthrow sovereign nation-states – they already recognize it as an essential strategy of the corporate-insurgency.

In New York Times’ article, “U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors,” it states:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.” 

With a well developed community Hackerspace, a similar network can be created for a local community to simply circumvent and replace corporate-financier monopolies, providing custom tailored services for a community its creators already know, and spreading the profits of communication monopolies across local communities worldwide – a redistribution of wealth done not through socialist handouts, but through innovative local entrepreneurship. A larger international Internet could be made by simply providing links between communities.

Image: Hackerspaces – sometimescalledmakerspaces- are local institutions that pool together both technological and human resources to prototype and manufacture local technology and solutions. They serve as the perfect nexus for solving everything from agricultural problems to creating local communication solutions, and even bringing manufacturing down to a personal level.

The alternative media is a perfect example of a new decentralized “institution” leveraging communication to successfully counter the corporate-insurgency, and it does so by leveraging technology that allows us to do as individuals what was once only possible with large, capital intensive organizations.

The alternative media also reflects some of the tactical considerations expressed by the USMC COIN field manual in regards to logistics. By using large corporate-owned, free services like Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others to spread a constructive message aimed at developing our local communities, and against the corporate-insurgency, we are essentially exploiting their own logistical lines for our own cause.

Conclusion 

It must be understood that while, without taking these basic aspects into consideration a political movement is sure to fail, this does not by any means negate the work of activists focused in other areas. A synergy must be created between all efforts aimed at unwarranted corporate-financier influence – but these fundamentals must be understood by all involved.

It must also be understood that not everyone employed or involved in a large corporate-financier, multinational corporation is a bad person. In fact, many people who work for corporations like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Halliburton, Exxon, and even Monsanto or Cargill are hardworking and incredibly talented. Like many military who leave the service and join the cause of humanity, these people can become some of our most valued allies if and when they realize the greater implications of what they are involved in and what, for their own best interests and those of humanity, they must next do.

For our part, we must work hard to develop our local communities, to create tangible solutions to the problems we face, superior local alternatives to replace the dependency that empowers special interests, and produce a viable model that is self-evidently a system people will want to join and help build.

Of all the aspects discussed in the voluminous collection of counterinsurgency manuals the US government has produced, possessing a morally superior cause and instilling a sense of legitimacy within a population ranks toward the top in importance. Building a local community with the people’s best interests addressed by the people’s own two hands themselves, exhibits just such a cause, featuring just such legitimacy. It would be a movement very difficult for the corporate-insurgency to prevail against, and is the key reason why their doctrine has failed them overseas in pursuit of their empire where nations and peoples have successfully accomplished this.

For the Oregon ranchers, their ill-conceived strategy fits nowhere within the above outlined necessities for taking back our communities and institutions. A well-organized and well-armed citizenry if led and used properly, would deter confrontations before they even unfolded. A group finding itself in multiple armed standoffs before it has even built the necessary sociopolitical and technical underpinning necessary to sustain any kind of struggle, has failed to understand even the most elementary aspects of strategic doctrine and has doomed itself before it even began.

The best advice for those either joined with these ranchers, or supporting them, is to step back from the Hollywood narrative apparently being woven, see how our attention has been distracted away from real solutions and real local empowerment, and directed toward an expanding confrontation Wall Street and Washington are well prepared to easily win.

Attorney Alan Phillips, whose practice specializes in vaccine exemption law, lays out the case for legislative activism to counter the wave of coercive state legislation mandating extensive vaccination of children, and the elimination of choice.  The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act freed the vaccine industry of accountability and created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.  The corruption of science and research is discussed, as well as the unconstitutionality of many state vaccine laws. The challenging legal quagmire facing children and adults and the many arenas where vaccines are required is addressed, as well as recent draconian California legislation.    

Transcript:

Tony Rango: Alan Phillips. Welcome to Guns and Butter.

Alan Phillips: Thanks for having me. It’s a real pleasure and honor to be here.

Tony Rango: You are in a very unique position to discuss vaccine exemptions since you are the only lawyer in the US with a practice that focuses specifically on legal exemptions. And I know there’s a lot you have to share with our listeners on this topic, especially in light of recent California legislation mandating vaccines, SB 277 for children and SB 792 for adults. There are two areas: The first is corruption, an area you’ve been covering lately. The other is legal and legislative issues, which also include exemptions. Take us through the legal environment in which the vaccine industry operates that provides opportunity and what appears to be incentive to be corrupted. What did the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act change?

Alan Phillips: Well, first of all, we need to understand why that 1986 act was passed, and the pharmaceutical industry was going out of business. Not the pharmaceutical industry but the vaccine manufacturing portion of the pharmaceutical industry was going out of business in the early-1980s, mid-1980s. They were pulling out of the vaccine business. The court awards for vaccine injury and death were too many and too high, and Congress stepped in to save that industry.

We really have to question, I think, whether there was a need to save anything there but this was in kind of this broad premise about how vaccines are necessary; that’s an irrefutable fact so we’re not even going to debate that, because if it weren’t for vaccines we’d have rampant disease running everywhere and so forth. If you look at the official government statistics, and not only here in the US but also in Great Britain, in Australia and probably some other countries as well – the mortality decline from childhood infectious diseases dropped steadily across the 1900s, a period of decades. That drop was on average about 90% before vaccines were even introduced in the first place.

So vaccines may have had and may have some impact on disease incidence but not on disease mortality. We do not have low disease death rates with regard to the childhood infectious diseases today because of vaccines. Vaccines had nothing to do wit that. The vast majority of that decline preceded the introduction of vaccines. So I would question the need for anybody to do anything and decide to try to and protect the vaccine industry. If their products don’t stand on their own merits they should either fix the products or get out of the business.

And there’s a whole other category, a question about whether or not there are other ways of dealing with childhood infectious diseases. And I’ll just mention very, very briefly, because I think it’s such an important one that needs to become a bigger part of this conversation, and that is homeoprophylaxis, which is a very particular type of homeopathic remedy that has been demonstrated quite successfully in parts of India and in Cuba among other places in recent years where they have used homeoprophylaxis on literally millions of people and documented scientifically the results, and seen that it has been very effective. And it’s a fraction of the cost of convention allopathic immunizations, it’s more effective, and it doesn’t have a side effect of injury and death.

We know that vaccines cause injury and death. The federal government pays out money every year. Over the last six years the average payout was over $220 million a year, and that’s about twice the average annual payout over the life of the program, which is now, I think, in its 26th year of paying out money to compensate victims of vaccines. And that number’s enormous, Tony, but we know from multiple sources, including people from the FDA and the CDC but also non-governmental agencies such as the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and the National Vaccine Information Center, which has conducted independent surveys, that roughly only 1 to 10% of the serious vaccine adverse events ever even get reported.

This is not only a serious problem in that it means there’s literally no data available for anyone to use to calculate whether there’s any net benefit from vaccines. The cynical but informed among us would say that’s not an accident because we see people in the healthcare industry deliberately violating federal law. A part of that 1986 act, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, included federal statutes requiring anybody administering a vaccine to give a physical piece of paper to the vaccine recipient, or the parent if it’s a minor that’s being vaccinated, that spells out not only the supposed risks and benefits of vaccines but more importantly for purposes of this point, the existence of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which is one of the things that that 1986 act created. This is a program that compensates people or families of people who are injured or killed by vaccines.

So the vast majority of the injuries and deaths from vaccines are probably not even being reported at all. Again, we have multiple sources, governmental and non-governmental agencies agreeing at least in general terms that the vast majority never even gets reported. We have laws that require doctors – again, another part of this 1986 act – anyone administering a vaccine, if they see certain events in terms of medical conditions show up within a certain period of time after a vaccine – and it has nothing to do with whether the doctor thinks the vaccine has anything to do with it or not. It’s not about their professional opinion. If this condition shows up in this amount of time after a vaccine it has to be reported, and anything in the package inserts listed as a side effect, if that shows up it has to be reported. And yet, the majority of doctors are not reporting.

Tony Rango: I’ve never had a doctor say anything like that to me or give me any information ahead of time. Is that pretty standard or what’s your sense on that?

Alan Phillips: Well, surveys show that most doctors don’t do that and anecdotal evidence I hear over and over again from people like yourself just now who say, “No, they’ve never offered a piece of paper.” When my oldest son went in for his first immunization – this would have been over 22 years ago or about 22 years ago – we were handed a piece of paper. At that point in time I was not an attorney and I wasn’t familiar with this law. I wasn’t even aware of vaccine injury or death as a potential reality at that point in time, but I now know looking back that the piece of paper the doctor gave me was something he was required by law to give me. Maybe they were more consistent back then or maybe I just had one of the few who actually did it. But this doctor, it was real interesting. He was out of the room for some period of time for one reason or another and he came back in and I had read this paper while he was gone and I said, “Doctor, it says here that my son’s chance of dying from pertussis is 1 in 10 million but his chance of a serious adverse reaction are about 1 in 1750.” He got very angry with me and raised his voice and he was close to yelling at me and he says, “It doesn’t say that.” He storms out of the room and as he’s closing the door he says, “I guess I should read that some time.”

Tony Rango: Sorry for laughing. I was going to say, my understanding is and what happens in the media instead of reporting these is they demonize the parent who brings in their child who maybe has been vaccine injured to ask that question, and they’re ridiculed and told that can’t be possible.

Alan Phillips: Well, to be fair, I rarely have people ever call me up and say, “By the way, I want you to know that everything went smoothly and beautifully. Thanks for being there.” People contact me when they have problems. But certainly I hear anecdotally over and over again reports along the lines of what you just described, that many doctors – who knows how many, but many; it’s certainly common – for some reason on this issue it pulls them out of professional behavior.

I don’t think it’s an accident, frankly, because what I’ve heard from several doctors about medical school, they say, “We’re not taught anything about vaccines in medical school except here’s the schedule and vaccines are safe. And by the way, here are some pictures of children dying from these infectious diseases. This is why we need vaccines.” So there’s an emotional or psychological programming going on and what doctors have implanted in them at an emotional level is these horrible pictures of children dying from these infectious diseases.

And let’s not make any mistakes. These infectious diseases have been horrible killers in decades past. Now, 100 years ago a significant number of children died, and prior to that time, from these infectious diseases. So they certainly have been problems in the past, but what we are not told, because it’s not good marketing, is the fact that the deaths from these diseases, the death rate declined steadily for decades before vaccines ever came on the scene. So where we are today, before the measles vaccine was first introduced, in the years immediately preceding that, the measles was nothing more than a cold with spots. It was not regarded as something that anybody should be concerned about. Okay, you’re sick. Good. Now you’ll be done with it. Unlike a cold, it’s something you get once and you’re done with it, and so it was actually a good thing to get it, and we now know from medical research that getting measles and mumps and these childhood diseases actually protects from certain kinds of cancers and other chronic diseases later in life. So it’s beneficial to get, especially as a child, these childhood infectious diseases, and there was no problem with getting them until after there was a vaccine available, and then for marketing reasons they had to change the image of these diseases to make them something terrible and awful to be feared.

Tony Rango: Now it seems like it’s a life-threatening epidemic to get it.

Alan Phillips: Right. It’s not a life-threatening epidemic to get any of these diseases that they don’t have a vaccine for but the ones they have a vaccine for, they suddenly become life threatening because there’s a vaccine. We need to understand that vaccine policy law is driven by mainstream medicine. And mainstream medicine, for whatever good that it does and includes and has, is also severely and substantially corrupt. It’s corrupt in the sense that it has been skewed by the pharmaceutical industry’s influence over state and federal legislatures and health departments to skew policy and law to favor them from a marketing point of view.

Because not only are vaccines now a multi-billion dollar industry – and again, no liability, virtually no liability for all practical purposes – but vaccines are introducing chronic disease into the population and everyone who develops a chronic disease from a vaccine and it doesn’t kill them, then is potentially a lifelong customer for other pharmaceutical products.

We need to understand that psychopaths make up a certain percentage of the population. I’ve seen different figures ranging from 4 to 8%. And every psychopath is not a serial killer. Some of these people are intellectually brilliant and they learn at a very early age how to act appropriately. Even though they have no conscience themselves they can see and imitate and learn how to act, and some of these people will rise up the corporate ladder or the government ladder to key decision-making positions and, in fact, have done so.

So the evidence of this is not simply – this is not simply conspiracy theory. There’s objective evidence for this. The pharmaceutical industry routinely engages as just a matter of business practice in massive criminal behavior. There have been combined criminal / civil fines $100 million and up, as high as $3 billion or more, at least 33, 34 times since 2001. That’s just the ones above $100 million. I don’t have the time to go researching all the ones that were only in the millions or hundreds of thousands or whatever. And criminal fines have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars and even as high as $1 billion, the criminal portion of these larger combined criminal / civil fines. This is an industry that routinely engages in massive criminal behavior, as documented. Anybody can go to the Justice Department website and look it up. It’s right there for anybody to go see, who wants to take the time to do that.

So the question is, why do they do that? Well, for three simple reasons. One, nobody goes to jail. There’s nobody that’s held accountable in the way that people are ordinarily held accountable in our society for criminal behavior.

Two, there’s a net profit. They wouldn’t do this unless there was a net profit. And the behavior has gotten worse. If you look at the size and frequency and number of these fines, they have gotten larger and larger over the last several years compared to prior years, so the problem’s getting worse and worse and they wouldn’t do it unless there was a net profit, so there’s a net profit.

And then again, the third reason, because the people that are making these decisions – and I’m not rendering a diagnosis here; I’m using labels to make a point – they’re either sociopaths or psychopaths. And what I mean by that is they lack a conscience. They lack the ability to refrain from engaging in behavior, even though it’s profitable, because it’s going to cause some unnecessary death and disability. But when you make those kinds of decisions in the healthcare arena, well, at least the way the legal system is set up right now these people pay fines when they get caught. Who knows how many times they do things and don’t get caught? But when they get caught, yes, they’ll pay fines, and sometimes some pretty heavy fines.

I’m not suggesting that in 2012, for example, when GlaxoSmithKline paid a $3 billion fine – $1 billion criminal, $2 billion civil – I’m not suggesting they were happy. But there was this, to use a quick analogy, a little skit on the “Laugh-In” show two or three decades ago. The old lady comes into the pharmacy and she asks for her prescription, and the pharmacist says, “That will be $5.” You can tell how long ago it was now, right? He says, “That will be $5.” Then the phone rings and he picks up the phone and starts talking. Well, the little old lady pulls out two quarters and waves it in front of the guy but he’s busy on the phone and doesn’t see her. She sets the two quarters down on the counter and walks out. The pharmacist gets off the phone, looks down and sees 50 cents and he yells out to the lady, “No, lady, that wasn’t 50 cents; it’s $5.” But she’s already gone. The punch line is, “Oh, well, a quarter profit’s better than none.” So it’s like who cares if you pay a $3 billion fine if there’s a $20 billion profit?

The World Health Organization back in 2009 estimated that developed nations individually – this is not collectively – individually on average probably have about $23 billion of corrupt health care practice going on. I saw a more recent estimate talking about the US specifically, estimating something more on the range of $60 billion. In 2014, or at the end of 2014, the Justice department bragged that during 2014 they had recovered $3.3 billion. Let’s give credit where credit is due; that’s a lot of money to get back from the pharmaceutical industry. But if they’re doing $23 billion, or maybe $60 billion depending on whose estimate you look at, that’s one heck of a net profit.

So the industry certainly doesn’t want to pay fines if they can get away with it but when you’ve got that kind of a net profit, the only thing that’s going to stop somebody at that point is if they have a conscience and realize that, hey, it’s not okay to engage in behavior that creates unnecessary death and disability, or is even just morally or ethically wrong.

We need to understand that there are people in key decision-making positions who will make decisions that hurt, injure, and kill people so long as there’s a net profit and they are not being directly held accountable for it. There are people who will do that, there are people who have been doing it and are doing it as we speak. Once we get over this hump of, “Well, nobody would really do that,” then we can get to a place where we can really look at the problem and start to take some steps to address it.

Tony Rango: Right, and you mentioned this “accountability” for the pharmaceuticals but this is somewhat accountability because those companies are setting that money aside and the shareholders are paying, so there is not really accountability, but that doesn’t even exist with vaccines. You and I are paying that with our taxpayer funds that go into the system. Isn’t that correct?

Alan Phillips: Well, the way they have it structure and labeled, it’s a tax that the manufacturerpays, 75 cents on every vaccine. But do you think they take that out of their profit or you think they just add it on to the cost of the vaccine? So whether you want to say they pay for it or we pay for it sort of depends on how you want to look at it.

And then, who buys the vaccines? You and I do, so we’re paying that tax in the cost of vaccines, whether it’s the government – state and federal governments, of course, purchase vaccines and administer vaccines, but private citizens do, as well, so it’s some combination.

But any way you want to look at it, it’s not like they’re taking that out of their bottom line and just taking a hit for the common good. That’s not the way this works. So yeah, at the end of the day it’s the taxpayers who are paying this net money. The tax on each vaccine that goes into a federal government fund that then is where the money comes from to compensate, through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, victims or their families.

Tony Rango: Which, when there is criminal or quasi-criminal behavior, that is not impacting the actual manufacturers of the vaccines or the doctors themselves that are administering it.

Alan Phillips: Well, part of this 1986 act requires vaccine manufacturers to take steps to make safer vaccines, but there’s no enforcement mechanism. They’re in this program happy to have the program that significantly removed liability when the act was passed in 1986.

But then we had a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court case that took it even further, that basically said there’s virtually no liability now. Originally, the law said you have to go to this federal program first and if you don’t like the results of that, then you can go to state court and sue just like you would any other personal injury case. But the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the language in such a way as to say, no, you really can’t do that anymore. Again, for all practical purposes, it is the first and last stop now.

I said earlier, doctors are required to give information to vaccine recipients or their parents, informing people of this program. Well, they’re not doing that, and there are today roughly 140, 150 attorneys around the country who do these vaccine injury compensation cases – and by the way, for all people listening to this, there is no cost to hire one of these attorneys. The government pays the attorneys on both sides in these cases, and there are people representing themselves because they can’t afford an attorney, and they don’t realize you don’t have to afford an attorney.

So you always want to have an attorney whenever you can with any important legal matter because, unfortunately, the legal system is complex and there are a lot of people with winning cases who lose because they don’t know how to navigate the legal system. Unfortunately, it’s a complex system and it really helps to have an expert guide you through that system or represent you through the system, especially with vaccine injury compensation.

Tony Rango: Well, let’s go back to the corruption in science. I want to talk a little bit more about that. In what other ways have science and research been corrupted and maybe tell us a little about Dr. Thompson and what he has revealed.

Alan Phillips: Let me back up a step on a couple of points here. I want to talk just a little bit about the medical publishing industry, because what doctors rely on – very few doctors have time, and medical students even less time, to actually go out and do medical research on vaccines or anything else for that matter. When they can find time to read the medical journals they’ll look at the conclusions, and that’s what they base their practice in large part on, or the CDC or other governmental, non-governmental agencies will often look to the medical literature, and that can drive to a large extent what goes on.

Now, the point I’m about to get to is separate and apart from the idea of cherry-picking, which goes on considerably, where you look at the studies that say what you want them to say and you ignore the studies that don’t say what you want them to say. Somehow those studies are either nonexistent or they’re wrong by default because if you have a preconceived conclusion rather than looking objectively to see whether or not there’s consensus in the medical literature and if so what it is, and if there’s not consensus what are the conflicting points and why and so forth. Doctors don’t have the time to get into that.

So, a couple of comments here from three different people who are either in or have been in the heart of the mainstream medical publishing world, and the first quote here comes from Dr. Marcia Angel from Harvard University. She was an editor for the New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years and she went public, I think it was back in 2004 – it’s been several years ago now. She said, “It’s simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians and authoritative medical guidelines.” She was very reluctant to say this. She says, “I take no pleasure in this conclusions, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.” She wrote a book called The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. It comes from somebody who’s as much a mainstream insider as you could be, or certainly she was.

Another quote here. This comes from a gentleman by the name of John Ioannidis, and he wrote something in 2005, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” He says in the abstract of this article: “Simulations show that for most study designs and settings it’s more likely for a research claim to be false than true,” and that “for many current scientific fields, research findings may simply be accurate measures of the prevailing bias,” going to the comment I was saying there that there seems to be a tendency to when you want to assert a point of view you cherry-pick.
Now, what did Dr. Angel say in articles I’ve read about hers and probably gets into in depth in her book? In one sense it’s sort of simple. It’s just that money is driving what gets published and what the published research says, rather than objective science. You publish a study and it either supports or doesn’t support a new drug and millions if not a billion dollars or more can be on the line there. And there’s just something about money, when it reaches a certain level that it takes on a life of its own and it rolls over anything in its path, and whether it’s because people have phenomenally myopic vision and can’t or refuse to see the moral and ethical issues and lines and even outright civil and criminal legal lines or because they just deliberately choose to roll over it anyway, who knows in any given situation? But that is, in fact, what’s happening, is that these lines are being rolled over.

More recently, just last year, this same fellow, Dr. Ioannidis, says, “Currently many published research findings are false or exaggerated and an estimated 85% of research resources are wasted.” And I would add, wasted maybe with respect to objective science but probably otherwise very carefully targeted to sell products.

I want to take it one step further, because this comes from earlier this year: Richard Horton, who is the Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet. This is one of the most respected and prestigious medical journals on the planet, as is The New England Journal of Medicine that Marcia Angel used to work for, as well. But here’s Richard Horton, the editor in chief of The Lancet. He says, “The case against science is straightforward. Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” He gives a quick list of some of the reasons for this but the end phrase here is very telling, Tony. He says, “Science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

Now, this is not the kind of language that somebody who’s the editor-in-chief of a prestigious medical journal uses, “Science has taken a turn towards darkness.” That’s just not a scientific phrase or even an intellectual kind of phrase. To me, this is a cry for help. “Science has taken a turn towards darkness.” He sees something that is totally out of control and just doesn’t have any other way to phrase it. This is my interpretation, but I can’t come up with any other explanation for this. That phrase, “Science has taken a turn towards darkness,” that’s a cry for help.
But some of it gets just downright absurd. There was a Harvard science journalist who submitted 304 versions of a fraudulent research paper to open access journals and more than half of the journals accepted the paper for publication. What kind of a world do we live in when you can make up a study and somebody will publish it?

But it gets even more absurd. I’m going to take it one step further. This is from an article in MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT News in April of this year, 2015, “How three MIT Students fooled the world of scientific journals.” These three students wrote a computer program that they called SCIgen. This computer program generates random computer science papers, complete with realistic looking graphs and figures and citations but it’s just random. It invents made-up science papers, and they’ve actually had these papers be accepted. One paper was accepted for presentation in a conference and there was a situation a couple years ago where the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and Springer Publishing removed more than 120 papers from their websites after a French researcher’s analysis determined that more than 120 papers were generated by SCIgen, a computer science program that was written just as a joke. Now, they had to be really good. These must have been really convincing-looking fake studies to be accepted, but how could anybody read a fake study and then not recognize that it’s a fake study, randomly generated?
So this is the point here. We’re at a place where scientific publishing is a joke. And I’m sorry to say that because I’m sure there are many credible researchers with high integrity who do serious work, submit it for publishing and get published, so I’m not saying that that doesn’t ever happen. But what is also happening is that you can just make up studies and a lot of times they’ll still get published. Or you can even have a computer program invent random, arbitrary studies and they get published. This is a very sad state of affairs that we’re in.

All this comes back to a real simple but profound point. We want to bring it back into vaccines specifically and medical publishing. If the medical literature is not reliable – and clearly, based on what I’ve just said, it’s not – then who should have the final decision making for you and your kids and when it comes to healthcare issues? You? Or the state? Or your employer? Or anybody who’s going to rely on this fraudulent research that’s out there – or potentially fraudulent research, unreliable?

Tony Rango: I heard about those different studies and things you mentioned and it’s truly amazing and, I think darkness captures it quite well.

Alan Phillips: Right. Well, this sort of leads into another question here. Vaccine policy and law – in fact, healthcare policy and law generally – is driven by mainstream medicine. So this gets into the question of why did we fail with SB 277 and another bill in Illinois that passed that is the most egregious religious exemption law I’ve ever seen in the country now, in Illinois. We had some wonderful successes in other parts of the country, but they’re going to come back better organized and with better strategies. We’ve got our work cut out for us here.
But there’s a real important distinction, especially with respect to talking with legislators, trying to educate them on the issue, in my opinion. The distinction has to do with the difference between what has been officially documented and what hasn’t. What I’m saying is, for purposes of educating legislators your better starting points are the already confirmed, officially, formally documented things, such as the fines that have been assessed and paid, for example.

I’ve started putting some of this information in graphs so you can look at it and see it as a picture. You know the old saying, a picture speaks a thousand words, or whatever it is, really can hold true for some of these vaccine issues. You look at a graph, and I’ve put one of these together just in the last few days, of the payouts year-to-year from the Vaccine Compensation Program and there’s all these tall bars on the right side of the graph because in the last six years the payout amounts have skyrocketed compared to all the prior years, the average in the last six years over twice the average across the duration of the whole program.

You look at a graph of the criminal / civil fines in the pharmaceutical industry that are above $100 million over the last, say, 15 years and you see in the last several years, 6, 7, 8 years, you see these bars on the right side that are way taller than all the bars on the left side and you see that the combined criminal fines are in the multi-billions of dollars in the last several years whereas they were only in the hundreds of millions of dollars in preceding years. Sometimes a graph just really communicates better than giving a study or writing a paragraph or whatever.

Tony Rango: You’ve also been working with a lot of healthcare workers, as well, over the past number of years, certainly as the pressure’s been increasing. What kind of success have you been having with exemptions and getting them support with their jobs?
Alan Phillips: Well, based on what my clients have been telling me, and I’ve heard this from at least two different clients in different parts of the country where they say, ‘Our hospital system has had over 1,000 requests for exemptions,’ or over 1,500 in one instance; the hospital administrators brag that they only allowed four exemptions in one case or very few or no exemptions. So they offer exemptions but they don’t really want to grant any.

What I see in my practice is that the vast majority of my healthcare worker clients will get the exemptions, high 90s. I haven’t kept track of it specifically and documented it but the vast majority of them do. When people don’t get an exemption, if they have come to me up front and they’re working with me up front as supposed to trying it on their own and then they get rejected – because a lot of times people have unwittingly, of course, shot themselves in the foot and it can be really more difficult in those situations. But the people who come to me up front from the start will almost always, if not always, end up with a qualifying exemption. The question then becomes does the employer cooperate or not. The problem with any vaccine exemption arena is that the people on the other side have the leverage. If they want to make you jump through hoops to enforce your rights, they can do that. And so the question then becomes, when that happens, how far is my client willing to go?

So the few instances where I’ve had clients who didn’t get an exemption, it’s usually because they stopped fighting at some point even though they had a winning position. They didn’t want to pay me or didn’t have money to pay me to take it to the next step or they go to the EEOC, for example, which is where you go if you have a dispute with an employer about a religious exemption and you want to take it to the next step formally. Maybe if the EEOC doesn’t get it right you can go to court then, but people or the emotional stamina or whatever it is to go to court. So I’ve had clients with winning cases that just stopped at some point, for whatever reason, but again, the vast majority of them in this arena are successful. And my impression is, from what my clients tell me, is that the vast majority who aren’t getting legal help are not successful because people on both sides of the issue don’t understand how it works legally.

Tony Rango: Right. So you’re able to help these folks more with the federal religious exemption rather than working with families, say, in California who are dealing with state exemption issues. Is that correct?

Alan Phillips: Well, I work with clients and when necessary local attorneys around the country, and whether it’s state law or federal law or mixture just depends on the specific situation. There’s a long list of different categories where exemption issues come up and most people don’t realize – I didn’t realize it when I first got into this work – how vast and broad and deep it is. But vaccines are required at birth, for school and daycare enrollment, for college enrollment, increasingly at work, in the military and that can involve military members, families and civilian contractors, for immigrants, which could include foreign adopted children.

Another issue I see coming up more and more in my practice is where parents divorce or split up and disagree about whether or not to vaccinate the kids, and the legal arguments there are completely different from other child custody disputes, and family law attorneys just don’t see that. I’ve spoken now with dozens of family law attorneys around the country and I’ve never talked to one who knew what I had to share with them before we got on the phone and talked about it. It’s not because I’m smarter than any of them but I’ve just been focused on this issue for years and years, and they’re seeing it for the first time when it comes up there. So just a lot of different arenas where vaccines are required, and you’ve got to understand what law applies and how it applies and what the exemptions are.

In terms of exemptions for school and daycare, for example, it varies from state to state because the federal government doesn’t have authority to mandate vaccines for state residents. But with employers and employees, there are only three states that have state exemption laws that would apply to any healthcare workers or employees, so most states don’t have a state law at all that can help them in that arena. But federal civil rights law can help them. And it’s not about a vaccine religious exemption, per se, it’s about religious discrimination in the workplace, but the law can function for practical purposes like a vaccine religious exemption.

So you just have to understand what situation you’re in, what the starting place is in terms of the law and often it’s a mixture of state and federal law because any time, for example, there’s a religious exemption that brings in federal constitutional free exercise of religion rights and so forth.

Tony Rango: Let’s switch gears a little bit and go back to California. I wanted to get on the SB 277. You said you had some advice for parents regarding that, as far as an approach goes either for other states or for parents in California. What are your thoughts?

Alan Phillips: Well, first of all, just the obligatory disclaimer: I’m not offering legal advice on the air here; I’m just offering information for general educational purposes. But I would point out that the language in SB 277 refers to a “letter or affidavit” that if you get into the daycare or school before January 1st 2016, then you can preserve your right to continue exercising the personal belief exemption under the old law until the child reaches either kindergarten or seventh grade. So people whose child is going into kindergarten or seventh grade next fall I think are out of luck unless they’re going to home school or leave the state, frankly.

But a lot of people are saying, “Make sure you have a personal belief exemption in to preserve your right under the old law.” And I’m not asserting one way or the other. I’m just raising a question. I don’t know whether a personal belief exemption falls under this label of “letter or affidavit.” So if it were me and I lived in California I would write a letter and I would get it notarized, which is what makes a document an affidavit, or I would label it affidavit. I would make sure that I had a letter or affidavit is what I’m saying. It may be that the personal belief form under the old law counts as a letter or affidavit but I’m not sure if it does, so I’m just raising that question.

But there’s an aspect of this new law, Tony, that is really fascinating and that’s that it rewrites the medical exemption and it’s incredibly broad. It really puts the total authority in the hands of medical doctors, and without restricting them by saying you have to meet this condition or this criteria in a specific way. It’s very general language, which leaves it pretty wide open for doctors to exercise their professional discretion and that’s the end of the story. So I don’t know whether doctors who write medical exemptions are going to be … There could be some consequence for that politically or some kind of pressure, but the language of the law gives the doctor pretty much total authority to decide.

Tony Rango: Yeah, and that raises actually a question I had. Have you heard of doctors getting punished for not sticking to certain vaccination schedules or getting an incentive to have a higher vaccination rate or compliance rate? Is there any kind of incentive or coercion techniques?
Alan Phillips: When you have these enormous financial interests and people who are able and willing to do anything to protect those interests and further those interests, you risk some negative feedback when you start messing with those interests. And the vaccine industry – It was really interesting that somebody else had to sort of bring this to my attention: The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and that 1986 law substantially removes liability for manufacturers or anyone administering vaccines for the death and disability that’s caused by vaccines. But your vaccine has to be on the list.

So the industry has been making this aggressive shift away from whatever else they do and into the vaccine arena where they have limited liability. And so there are all kinds of things now, treatments that are being developed, that are beginning called vaccines that have nothing to do with childhood infectious diseases. There are vaccines under development for obesity, for cocaine addiction, for things you would never think of as having to do with a vaccine, and if it has anything to do with the immune system I guess they can call it a vaccine – and then if they can get it on the vaccine list they’ll have no liability for it. And the patents on a lot of the blockbuster drugs have recently run out or are running out and so they’re looking for another basket to put their eggs in, and they’re putting it in the vaccine basket.

So the push for flu vaccines is just a door opener. The CDC has been saying for years already that they want to revaccinate every adult with all the childhood vaccines, but there are literally hundreds of new vaccines in development. I heard a figure over 270 vaccines, and this was several months ago now, that were already at the FDA waiting for approval or licensure – vaccines have to be licensed by the FDA before they can be administered in the U.S. – or they were in clinical trials, the last stages before going to the FDA. So there’s just this enormous shift into the vaccine arena and away from other places where the profits are not as big and the liability is still there.

This is a disturbing progression because we’re going to see more and more kinds of vaccines developed, or things called vaccines that you would never think of as having anything to do with vaccines, so they can get into this no-liability arena. And every man, woman and child on the planet is a potential recipient of vaccines from the moment of birth until somewhere up to, what, a year after you die you’re supposed to keep getting flu shots now, I think. It might as well be, as ridiculous as all this is, and there’s just no limit to the number of vaccines, as far as the industry’s concerned, that any person can get at any stage and age in their life.

The reason they’re requiring healthcare workers to get flu vaccines is the healthcare workers are the door-opener to the rest of the adult population. We’re supposed to all look at the healthcare workers and say, “Oh, they’re the health professionals. They’re all getting flu shots. It must be good. I better go get my flu shot.” Of course, they’ll conveniently leave out the part that the reason they’re getting these shots is because they’d lose their jobs if they didn’t, and then the flu vaccine is a door-opener to literally hundreds of new vaccines to come. So it’s an open-ended agenda. There’s no light at the end of this tunnel.

Tony Rango: Right. And you mentioned getting vaccinations at birth and my understanding, I think I heard you talk about this at one point, is why they’re given at birth and at such a young age, because you have such an under-developed immune system until you’re about one year old. So why would you actually need a vaccine when you’re that young?

Alan Phillips: Well, I saw a doctor at a formal presentation several years ago say that children shouldn’t be vaccinated at all until you’re about 4 or 5 because of the development and the maturation of the immune system. So there are different opinions out there about who should get how many vaccines and when, if any.

And my position, my professional, public position is everybody should have that right to make that decision for themselves and their children, and in consultation with the healthcare professional of their choosing whether it’s allopathic or otherwise, because as soon as you put that decision in the hands of the state, where you’re being required to, then the door’s open for industry to influence to its benefit and to our detriment that decision, which is exactly what’s going on in the world here.

The hep-B vaccines, when you say why are they doing it, it just depends on what perspective. One answer to that question is because they can get away with it and make lots of money for it. Hepatitis B is not a high-risk disease for newborns. I can count on one hand the number of newborn children I’ve ever heard of anywhere who were sexually promiscuous intravenous drug users. It’s just a really small percentage. I think really right down there at or next to zero, I would guess. I’m being facetious here, but the point is to show you how incredibly stupid this is.

I remember somebody telling me that they had asked a nurse once, “Why do we vaccinate newborns?” and the answer something like, “Because that’s what we do.” That’s the mentality that’s out there with a lot of people. They just follow orders. You do what you’re told. They don’t want to make waves because they don’t losetheir job or be disciplined or be scolded or yelled at by the supervising doctor or whatever, so people are just all following orders.

Well, that’s what happened to Nazi Germany and you see the results there. There’s a huge profit there, but the medical reason that they give is, “Well, this was the only vaccine that at least some newborns would actually have an immune response to.” They, of course, have tried to give all the other vaccines at birth but there’s no immune response so they wait until 2 months and 4 months and 6 months and 12 and 15 months and whatever it is they do with which vaccines. Supposedly it’s based on when they can get immune response in the infant or toddler, whatever it is. That’s the argument, so that’s why hepatitis B and no other vaccines, but why would you vaccinate for hepatitis B at all? The only risk is if a child’s mother has hepatitis B, and you can test the mother ahead of time and find out. You don’t need to risk injury or death from the vaccine by vaccinating every newborn just in case Mom has hepatitis B. No. You test Mom.

And a vaccine’s not going to help you anyway. This is the same story, you go into the emergency room with a deep cut or puncture wound and they want to give you a tetanus shot. It’s not going to help you. If you’re exposed to hepatitis B at birth, a hepatitis B vaccine is not going to help you. Vaccines take days or weeks to develop a full antibody response, and if you’re exposed to tetanus by the cut the tetanus vaccine isn’t going to help you. What you need are tetanus antibodies. Maybe that would help you, but I’ll tell you, when I’ve talked about this with Dr. Mayer Eisenstein he said, “Well, they used to give the tetanus antibodies in the emergency room but they stopped doing it because the reactions were so severe, so they said, ‘Well, we’ll just give the vaccines’.”

The whole thing is medically ridiculous. It serves a non-medical agenda and most people are just going to follow orders and not question anything and not look into it for themselves. We’ve got to get over that.

The shift that is taking place, Tony, and that we need to facilitate with shows like this and other things that we can do is a shift from external reliance to internal reliance, where we just turn over all the important decision making to other people and just blindly follow whatever they say, because whenever you do that, you open the door to manipulation and control and that’s exactly what’s happened.

Now, I’m not saying you don’t look outside of yourself to get information. But at the end of the day you take responsibility for deciding what’s best for you and your children and we work to get laws in place that allow us to do that, because while ultimately this is a scientific issue – are vaccines safe, are they effective, are they necessary, are there other things we can do, that’s all science questions. The way it plays out in our lives day-to-day is a legal question. At any given point in time when somebody’s required to get a vaccine there’s either a law that says you can say or no or there isn’t. So where the rubber meets the road primarily is in the state legislature, so we’ve got to become legislatively involved whether we like that or not, we’ve got to be proactive pushing our agenda for informed choice because whether we do that or not they’re pushing their agenda backed by huge sums of money and lobbyists and so forth. So if we don’t become proactive we lose. It’s not a question of if; it’s just a question of when. So that’s where we need to get involved here.

Tony Rango: Right, and you mentioned getting legislatively active, and I would point listeners to check out the National Vaccine Information Center, NVIC.org, I believe it is. Go there and you can get information about the states and what’s happening in your own state, and also get on their list and get active so that you can get involved with what’s happening locally in your own area and your state.

Alan Phillips: Yeah, and I strongly recommend them. They have what they call their Advocacy Portal. They actually have a separate web address for that. You can get there from NVIC.org or you can go there directly from NVICAdvocacy.org, and that’s the Advocacy Portal. And they have really streamlined the process. You no longer have to take time off and make it a part-time job to be legislatively active. You can go to this website and sign up, and if you choose to join and give them your mailing address information the software will tell you who your representatives are and what their phone numbers and addresses are. They keep that information confidential, of course, so only they and the NSA have access to it. That’s a feeble attempt at humor there. Unfortunately, it’s probably true. But the point is this. They’ve made it as easy as possible to be legislatively active and involved.

Tony Rango: Excellent. Well, Alan Phillips, thank you very much.

Alan Phillips: Thank you, Tony. It’s been a pleasure.

* * * * *

You’ve been listening to Alan Phillips interviewed by Tony Rango. Today’s show has been Vaccines: Threads of Corruption. Alan Phillips is a practicing attorney headquartered in North Carolina. He is a nationally recognized legal expert on vaccine policy and law, whose practice is focused solely on vaccine exemptions and waivers, and vaccine legislative activism. He advises individuals, families, attorneys, legislators, and legislative activists throughout the U.S. on vaccine exemption and waiver rights, and vaccine politics and law. He hosts a weekly radio show, “The Vaccine Agenda” every Monday evening, available at blogtalkradio.com/thevaccineagenda. He is the author of The Authoritative Guide to Vaccine Legal Exemptions, published as an e-book. Visit his website at vaccinerights.com. He may be contacted at [email protected].

Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Visit us at gunsandbutter.org to listen to past programs, comment on shows, or join our email list to receive our newsletter that includes recent shows and updates. Email us at [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter at #gandbradio.

When rumors of sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker surfaced around spring 2006, the Nature Conservancy decided to girdle to death about three trees per acre near the bird’s potential habitat in an Arkansas swamp. The idea was to introduce some dying trees in a relatively young forest. This girdling of trees, although inspired by beavers, would never involve these gentle creatures because, all around the area, the beavers were being killed and their influence removed from the landscape. This brought to mind the notion that there is as much human arrogance in conserving as in ravaging nature. We are destroyer and creator. We reserve our absolute right to be gods, and this might well kill us all.

Is conservation a nostalgic wish to return to an America untouched by Europeans? This would hardly be possible without reducing the population to 16th century levels and forsaking most of the technological crutches of the last five centuries. The idea of conservation ought to be replaced by a desire to achieve a state of maximum ecological complexity, in which as many niches as possible may be filled. Consider a fish tank, with its bottom feeders, like the suckers and catfishes, and the middle and top feeders. A balance leads to a tank that stays clean with little input of human energy.

So-called foreign or invasive species can then be seen for what they are: creatures who have discovered and exploited an ecological vacuum. Nature is dynamic and cannot be conserved. Rivers shift their courses. One native parrot species disappears and a new one migrates into its place, just as the American dream, shorn by the wealthy and complacent American-born children, is continually renewed by new flocks of starry-eyed immigrants. The niches are not necessarily comfortable: they simply have to be unwanted. Pandas live precarious lives on a diet of one species of bamboo. Snow leopards live on impossibly steep and barren slopes in the Himalayas and an unreliable diet of antelopes.

The migrants are not necessarily driven by competition, as suggested by Darwinian theory, but by their own ingenuity. The notion of giraffes developing longer and longer necks while a mad herd grazes all around them has always confounded me. I think that a giraffe becomes a giraffe by learning a new trick, isolating himself and others of his kind in a new niche, and reproducing, unbothered by competitors or predators for many generations. Many species observed on the discovery of islands have been as improbable in appearance and innocent of predation or competition.

Human immigrants, by this notion of competition and predation, move to their new countries because they cannot compete for jobs, or they are being persecuted. Though this is no doubt true for some immigrants. I think we can get a clearer picture of most immigrants’ ambitions by their wishes for their children rather than for themselves. They do not merely want their children to get jobs. They work so that their children will achieve a level of self-realization that they themselves never dared even to dream about. This goes well beyond the trivial notions of competition and self-preservation.

On the other hand, consider the seal clubbers. These appear to be an isolated population of humans who have carefully and abundantly bred themselves for cruelty and idiocy. How can there possibly be any good in destroying their environment and making it a living hell for the seals with whom they share it? These humans reproduce beyond their means and prostitute themselves to the ship owners to whom they provide the seals. In short, they behave as a pack of mad dogs, without loyalty even to themselves: the ultimate in domestication. They reproduce, all right, but are they fit, in the Darwinian sense? Would it not be better for them to make fewer offspring and give birth to themselves?

Has no one else said that humans merely contribute to a great ongoing experiment, where as many of life’s possibilities are being tried and tested: our contributions being different but no better than those of a butterfly or tarantula. We do not stand at the apex of a pyramidal scheme but merely form a tenuous link in a great circle.

Our question to ourselves should be: given our specific talents, how can we promote the existence of other life forms and enhance and support their contributions? Arguably, our most laudable talents are:

• Our invention of time beyond our own lifetimes;
• Reading and writing;
• Manipulation of the natural world.

All of this is quite pointless if we life solely for our own pleasure and reproduction and then crash and burn as an index species. It is useless even if we learn to respect Nature in the abstract, as something to fear and leave alone. No. Nature must become as real as a chick or a grasshopper eating from our hands, if we are to survive. It is simply not in us to feel an ideal as fiercely as a kiss.

Dady Chery is a Haitian-born writer and the author of We Have Dared to be Free: Haiti’s Struggle Against Occupation. Paintings are renditions of Paradise by Haitian artists Fritzner Alphonse, Wilson Bigaud, Gerard Fortune, Fritz Merise, and Pierre Maxo, respectively, from top to bottom.

“The way Russia is now structured as a political unit, it looks very much like a big corporation…Putin basically, he’s anything but a dictator, he’s more like a chair of a board.” -Boris Kagarlitsky

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

 

Length (59:33)

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

This special holiday edition of the Global Research News Hour features a speech by Boris Kagarlitsky, delivered at the University of Manitoba September 27, 2015, as the closing keynote speech from the inaugural Geopolitical Economy Research Group Conference.

Boris Kagarlitsky is a native of Russia. A political dissident, Kagarlitsky has been imprisoned twice in his country – once under the Soviet regime of Leonid Brezhnev, and once under Boris Yeltsin. He is director of the Moscow-based Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements, a leading Russian leftist think-tank. Kagarlitsky is also the editor of the on-line magazine Rabkor, and author of numerous books, including ”Empire of the Periphery” (Pluto) and “From Empires to Imperialism” (Routledge).

In his September 27 talk, Kagarlitsky devoted his attention to the state of Russian politics and economics in the post communist era. He explained the role played by the oligarchs in Russian and Ukrainian society, the dynamics of political decision making in Putin’s Russia, and how the situation has been influenced in the wake of US and other foreign political and economic decisions.

Video of the talk along with a question and answer discussion is available below.

Footage courtesy of Sean Cain and Nicolas Kochay of Better World Communications

For more on the Geopolitical Economy Research Group 2015 Conference, please visit www.gergconference.ca.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

 

Length (59:33)

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . The show can be heard on the Progressive Radio Network at prn.fm. Listen in every Monday at 3pm ET.

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border. It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia Canada. – Tune in every Saturday at 6am.

As the American Historical Association (AHA) prepares to vote this week on a symbolic resolution that affirms support for the right to education in the occupied Palestinian territories, apologists for the Israeli regime’s policies against Palestinians are putting forward nonsensical rationalizations for their opposition to the measure. Writing in History News Network, University of Maryland History Professor Jeffrey Herf (pictured left) essentially argues that his profession has no practical value: “as historians we have neither the knowledge nor expertise to evaluate conflicting factual assertions about events in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.”

If historians should not evaluate the veracity of factual assertions about an issue then what exactly is the use of historical studies? To merely compile and organize documents? Surely a historian’s job involves analytical – in addition to technical – skills. And surely their methods include empirical analysis – no different than a scientist testing a theory. If someone says the earth is round but another person says the earth is flat, that doesn’t mean the scientist should throw his hands up in the air and say “as scientists we have neither the knowledge nor expertise to evaluate conflicting factual assertions.”

Historians analyzing political questions use the same principles as scientists testing a theory. Take, for example, conflicting accounts of the actions of the Belgians under King Leopold in the Congo near the end of the 19th century. Leopold claimed he treated the Congolese people benevolently as part of his “Christian duty” to help the poor. Others claimed Leopold’s forces were engaged in the systematic plunder of resources carried out through massive violence. They described women held hostage by Belgian forces to force Congolese men to engage in involuntary labor, with the hands of those who did not produce enough rubber for the colonists cut off and kept as trophies.

According to Herf’s axiom, historians would not have the ability to distinguish between these competing claims. It would be outside the scope of the historical vocation to evaluate the available evidence and reach a conclusion about the truth.

In the Congo, the African American historian George Washington Williams worked tirelessly to document the true condition of the local population under Belgian rule. As Adam Hochschild explains in his book King Leopold’s Ghost, Williams’s insistence on questioning the official narrative enabled him to uncover and expose the brazen lies meant to cover up the genocidal destruction of an entire society for the material enrichment of a tyrant.

“Williams was a pioneer among American historians in the use of nontraditional sources. He sensed what most academics only began to acknowledge nearly a hundred years later: that in writing the history of powerless people, drawing on conventional, published sources is far from enough,” Hochschild writes.

Much like the Belgian regime in the Congo more than a century ago, the state of Israel today covers up its crimes against Palestinians by denial, deflection and counter-accusations. They rely on the support of apologists in media, government, civil society, and academia to side with authority by accepting their justifications at face value.

Herf writes that “(i)t is fair to insist that where there is an indictment, we must pay attention to the case for the defense.” Absolutely true. But we must pay attention to the evidence for the case itself, not merely conclude that the existence of a defense means there is no way to draw a conclusion about the facts.

Herf requested a response from the Israeli Embassy on accusations presented in the AHA resolution. Among their claims are that the movement of faculty, staff and visitors in the West Bank are not limited except occasionally because “Palestinian universities periodically serve as sites of violence and incitement.”

The evidence is overwhelming that movement in the West Bank is severely limited and adversely impacts education. A UN report found that checkpoints, settler violence, and long commutes present risks to West Bank students. Another UN report documented 542 obstacles to movement in the West Bank. Students from Gaza are denied permission to study in the West Bank, a policy that has been criticized by Amnesty International. The policy has been endorsed by Israel’s High Court. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have raided West Bank universities. Visiting academics are denied entry to the West Bank. After arbitrarily being denied entry to deliver several lectures there, world-renowned scholar Noam Chomsky compared his treatment by Israeli authorities to that of Stalinist regimes.

There is no evidence presented, however, to support the claim that Palestinian universities serve as sites of violence and incitement.

Herf also quotes the Israeli Embassy defending their bombing of the Islamic University in Gaza (IUG) in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge “not because it was a university but because it was used by the terrorist organization Hamas to manufacture and fire rockets at Israeli civilians.”

First, it should be noted that Hamas is not recognized as a terrorist organization by the United Nations. The description carries exactly as much weight as Hamas calling the Israeli regime a terrorist organization. But that is beside the point. The accusation is that Hamas used the university to make and fire rockets.

The source provided for this claim is “Israeli military intelligence officials.” After the bombing, the IDF claimed to target a “weapons development center” within the university. This is a predictable accusation. The IDF made similar accusations after bombing the same university in 2008. A UN report on that conflict “did not find any information about their use as a military facility or their contribution to a military effort that might have made them a legitimate target.”

Rami Almeghari, who teaches journalism at IUG, noted in the Electronic Intifada that the university is not run by Hamas or any other political party. Students and faculty, like those at any higher educational institutional, have varied political affiliations. Many others, like himself, belong to no party.

“Contrary to what Israel claims,” Almeghari writes, “Gaza universities do not have departments dedicated to military research or training. This is in contrast to Israeli universities which play an integral role in the military occupation and weapons development and have actively promoted the onslaught in Gaza.”

None of the Israeli government’s accusations are substantiated by anything other than its own word – which should be treated with the same skepticism as any criminal defendant pleading his innocence. On the other hand, a mountain of evidence from independent sources (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch,UNESCO, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Institute for Middle East Understanding, B’Tselem, etc.) supports the accusations in the AHA resolution.

The idea that evaluating contrasting factual assertions and reaching a judgment is outside the scope of a historian’s profession is asinine. This notion is beneficial for the propagation of state propaganda, but devastating for the advancement of human rights, including the right to education.

Matt Peppe writes the Just the Facts blog. He can be reached on Facebook and Twitter or by email at [email protected].

Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont gave a speech yesterday that is destined to go down in the history books of this era, further enshrining him as one of the most courageous voices of our time. Sanders promised to break up the serially criminally-inclined banks on Wall Street and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act to drive a permanent stake through the heart of too-big-to-fail. But if you watched either his official campaign’s YouTube video of his speech or the one provided by volunteers for his campaign, three key passages of what he said have gone missing from the video. We were able to reconstruct the full speech as delivered by transcribing the three missing sections from a YouTube video posted by the PBS Newshour which, notably, had no gaps in its video. (Watch the PBS video of the speech at the end of this article.)

Perhaps it’s simply attributable to a glitch. On the other hand, if you are familiar with the dirty tricks used by the American Liberty League to undermine proposed reforms by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a similar era of unprecedented corruption and one percent control, or conversant with how the Kochtopus is attempting to rewrite The Big Short movie, you might well harbor suspicions of skulduggery.

The first missing chunk of video comes early in Sanders speech as he explains what a real banking system is supposed to do. The portion that appears in orange below is missing from the official video:

Sanders: “We need a banking system that is part of the productive economy – making loans at affordable rates to small and medium-sized businesses so that we can create decent-paying jobs in our country. Wall Street cannot continue to be an island unto itself, gambling trillions in risky financial instruments, making huge profits and assured that, if their schemes fail, the taxpayers will be there to bail them out.”

What could possibly be so threatening in describing Wall Street as “an island unto itself, gambling trillions…” that someone would censor it from a speech? Well, Wall Street is located in Manhattan – an island. And while Manhattan is often referred to as the economic and cultural center of America, it’s also where the vast majority of financial crime is originating and which has, not coincidentally, “more billionaires than any other city in the world,” a total of 78 according to Forbes. Many of these billionaires have fleeced shareholders, or the banks’ depositors, or investors to achieve that one-percent status.

(…)

Click here to read the rest of this article

Last July’s immolation murders made world headlines. Three Palestinian Dawabsha family members succumbed to devastating third-degree burns too severe to save them, including 18-month-old infant Ali.

Four-year-old Ahmed alone survived, still hospitalized in intensive care. His painful struggle to recover continues.

Israel stonewalled for months, knowing the guilty parties, refusing to bring charges on the phony pretext of “protect(ing) the identity” of alleged intelligence sources, effectively sanctioning cold-blooded murder.

Had one or more Palestinians committed a similar act against Jews, they’d likely have been hunted down and extrajudicially executed – denied due process and judicial fairness.

Perhaps the lingering effects of brutal murders capturing world attention finally got Israel to act. On Sunday, two Jewish terrorists were indicted for murder.

Amiram Ben Uliel, aged 21, faces three murder charges, an unnamed minor indicted as an accomplice. Two others (possibly three) face terrorism related charges along with the two murder suspects.

A gag order remains in place so further details aren’t known, including whether suspects were released pending trial. Much about the investigation and ongoing process remains confidential. The Palestinian public’s right to know is ignored.

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked suggested the suspects may not be tried fairly, barely stopping short of supporting their immolation murders.

Will prosecutions result in slap-on-the-wrist sentences, perhaps commuted after short-term imprisonment if any hard time is imposed?

Why did Israel wait five months to act when the killers were known last summer, should have been arrested and prosecuted straightaway, leaving doubt now whether justice will be served?

A court is set to hear arguments to lift some gag order restrictions. Attorney Itamar Ben Gvir, representing several of the suspects, said their confessions were obtained through torture.

“The indictment is not the end of the story, but the opening of a Pandora’s box for the Shin Bet,” he said. “My clients are innocent. (They) only confessed because (of) severe(ly) abus(ive) interrogation.”

Shin Bet claims they only faced “moderate physical pressure,” legal in terror investigations, not subjected to torture or other forms of abuse.

What happens at trial and its aftermath remains to be seen. Israel crimes against Palestinians almost never are punished. Extremist settlers freely commit violence and vandalism unaccountably.

Israeli soldiers and militarized police extrajudicially execute defenseless Palestinians with impunity. They’ve been denied justice for nearly seven decades. Nothing in prospect suggests change.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at[email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

SouthFront: Analysis & Intelligence is continuing to study the balance of powers in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region. China has already contributed and is contributing many resources to the modernization of its Navy. The growing Chinese naval power is the main reason of the US’s attention to the South China Sea and the whole American policy aimed to restrain the Chinese expansion in the region. In turn, without a powerful Navy, China won’t be able to continue pursue own geopolitical goals and defend crucial maritime routes.

Introduction

When most people think of a modern warship, they envision a sleek vessel with a stealthy superstructure, an advanced sensor and communications capability, a vertical launch system (VLS) and a balance of anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and anti-aircraft warfare (AAW) capabilities. The U.S. Arleigh Burke Class DDG is the poster boy of modern surface warfare ships. For many years, and arguably for many more to come, the Arleigh Burke Class DDG has been at the cutting edge of naval combatant design. It is; however, no longer alone.

Many nations that have advanced naval capabilities took notice when the first Arleigh Burke Class DDG came in to service, and immediately set out to learn from its strengths and to avoid its weaknesses. A number of nations incorporated into the U.S. defense structure, set out to build similar platforms with the same combat management system and defensive and offensive capabilities. Nations that found themselves outside this defense structure, and often times the target of a robust and adversarial U.S. defense posture decided to go “back to the drawing board” and design a vessel that could not only incorporate the strengths of the Arleigh Burke Class, but one that could exceed them. They decided to design a better vessel.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) was a force in need of modernization at this point. Chinese destroyers lacked the AAW capability to defend themselves beyond the range of land-based anti-aircraft missile batteries. With this in mind, China did not possess a “blue water” navy. In order to expand the effective range of its naval forces and to acquire the ability to project power farther out to sea, the PLAN needed modern warships that could both protect themselves and defeat an opponent.

The Chinese government would embark on the most extensive naval modernization program in modern history, one that has seen the PLAN grow from an antiquated coastwise navy to a truly potent blue water force. The crowning achievement of this effort is the Type 052 (NATO designation: Luyang-III) Class DDG.

Development history

The Type 052D Class DDG is the latest development in the Type 052 family of destroyers. The Type 052D was proceeded by the Type 052C and Type 052B Class destroyers, with the Type 052C being China’s first vessel to have true long range fleet air defense capability. The Type 052C used the same hull and propulsion systems as the Type 052B; however, the superstructure design was modernized and an active electronically scanned phased array radar was fitted coupled to a VLS equipped with 48 HQ-9 anti-aircraft missiles. This gave the vessel stand-alone AAW capabilities previously lacking in all other PLAN vessels. The ship also carried a complement of 8 anti-ship cruise missiles, carried in two 4 cell launchers. Rounding out her armaments, the Type 052C carries a 100mm deck gun, 2 x 30mm close-in defense guns and 6 x 324mm torpedo tubes in two triple launchers. The vessel has an aft hangar and flight deck for one helicopter for support, reconnaissance and long range ASW defense. The first Type 052C, Lanzhou DDG-170 was commissioned in September of 2005.

Type 052C picture illustrating convex radar array panels and round VLS 6 cell launchers.

China continued to make rapid advancements in both missile technology, battle management systems and AESA multi-function phased array radars in the first decade of the 21st century, and a more powerful warship built on the Type 052C platform was designed. The new vessel was designated the Type 052D and would be equipped with more advanced detection and targeting systems and an ingenious modular VLS. This modular VLS sets the Type 052D apart from other DDGs in the navies of the world and is a true game changer for the PLAN.

Capabilities

The Type 052D is a true blue water navy warship. It hull and propulsion provide good seaworthiness, maneuverability and speed. Her AESA radar has obviously been improved with the most advanced such radar that China has produced. The easiest way to tell is by contrasting the flat panel phased array radar antennae of the Type 052D with the convex panel of its predecessor the Type 052C. This denotes that the newer vessel most likely has an improved version of the Type 348 radar that is also liquid cooled, as opposed to original the air cooled version. It is surmised that this new radar may be able to detect and track stealthy aircraft such as the F-35A/B Lightning II, but at what effective range is unknown.

Type 052D DDG.

The Type 052D has incorporated a brand new VLS system, which is also different from the Type052C VLS’s 6-missile cylinders. The new modular VLS is the most striking improvement of the new DDG. It is rectangular in design, with one 32 cell unit mounted forward of the superstructure and one 32 cell unit mounted aft. The VLS system resembles the U.S. Mk41 VLS, with no visible exhaust ports, which denotes that the system is either capable of cold launch, or the exhaust is vectored to a different location than its predecessor. Each VLS cell can house 4 missiles of different types. The VLS system is capable of launching surface-to-air missiles, anti-ship missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles including the YJ-18, anti-submarine missiles, and land attack cruise missiles. Such a system allows the Type 052D to be armed with a variety of missiles dependent upon the mission requirements. In theory, all VLS cells could be loaded with anti-ship missiles or anti-ship cruise missiles to create a powerful “Aircraft Carrier Strike Group Killer”. Such a load-out is imprudent, but possible. A more balanced armament would be most likely, and would be tailored to the mission, and with 12 vessels in the Type 052D Class planned, this represent a great deal of firepower.

Detail of differing VLS and AESA radar arrays of Type 052C and 052D Class DDGs.

YJ-18 Anti-ship Cruise Missile

The YJ-18 anti-ship cruise missile poses a significant threat to the U.S. Navy as well as any other potential adversary. It is believed that the missile has a subsonic cruising speed of roughly Mach 0.8 and then before striking its target it enters a terminal stage of supersonic speeds of up to Mach 3, which makes it extremely hard to intercept. The YJ-18 has an effective range of 290 nautical miles, with a theoretical threat area of 264,200 square nautical miles. This missile reportedly has an inertial guidance system fed by the BeiDuo Satellite System (BDS), often referred to as the Chinese GPS system.

Specifications:

Displacement: approaching 7,000 tons fully loaded.

L.O.A.:  156 m/ 511.8 ft.

Beam:   18 m/ 59 ft.

Draft:    6.5 m/ 21.3 ft.

Propulsion: Twin gas-turbine main engines, twin marine diesel auxiliaries.

Speed: 30+ knots.

Crew: 280

Weapons Systems:

64 cell VLS armed with any combination of ASW, ASCM, LACM, and SAMs.

• CY-5 ASW missiles
• HHQ-9 long range SAMs
• DK-10A medium range SAMs
• YJ-18 or YJ-83 ASCMs
• CJ-10 LACMs

1 x H/PJ-38 130mm deck gun.

2 x 30mm remote control guns

1 x H/PJ-12 CIWS

1 x 24 cell launcher for HHQ-10 short range SAMs

2 x triple launchers for 324mm torpedoes

Aviation: Hangar and flight deck for 1 helicopter.

Building Project

One of the more striking aspects of the Type 052D DDG program is the rate at which these surface warfare platforms have been constructed. Building of the first vessel the Kunming DDG-172, was commenced in 2012. Since then, a total of nine vessels have been built, with a tenth under construction. Three vessels are currently commissioned and operating with the PLAN’s South Sea Fleet. A total of twelve Type 052D DDGs are planned before resources and efforts are put into the larger 055 Type DDG.

Base of Operations

It is no coincidence that all three of the active Type 052Ds (Kunming DDG-172, Changsha DDG-173, and Hefei DDG-174) are assigned to the South Sea Fleet and are based at the PLAN fleet naval base on Hainan Island. This sends a clear message to other claimants to disputed South China Sea islands and waters that China has the power and intention of backing their claims with force if necessary. These vessels also act as a strong access/area denial tool with their capable AESA radars and powerful AAW and ASW capabilities. With these vessels, the PLAN can create a large air defense umbrella over Chinese military operations and building projects in the region.

Future Development

The PLAN has been working on a larger and more powerful vessel than the Type 052D DDG that they call the Type 055 DDG. Although called a destroyer, a design displacement of over 10,000 tons (some sources suggest a displacement as large as 14,000 tons) would put the vessel into the category of a guided missile cruiser (CG). The vessel would most likely be designed as a fleet command vessel and powerful air defense platform for a future aircraft carrier strike group. Although construction has not yet begun on such a vessel, a mock-up to test the layout of radar arrays and other sensors, communications and information processing systems has been built in Wuhan, China. The vessel would likely be armed with two 64 cell VLS fore and aft of the bridge, a large deck gun in a stealthy turret, as well as a full complement of ASW weapons and close-in defense systems. Missile complement for the 128 total VLS cells would be similar to the Type 052, with the possible addition of more capable cruise missiles not yet disclosed. There would be hangar space aft for two helicopters as well as a flight deck.

Type 055 DDG/CG concept.

Conclusions

China has steadily modernized its navy over the past two decades, with an obvious acceleration in both its capabilities and acquisition of vessels in recent years. The PLAN is now fielding vessels that are arguably on par with western navies, and have a decided advantage over all other regional navies with the exceptions of Japan and Australia. In this case; however, they are rapidly gaining a numerical superiority.

The Type 052D guided missile destroyer is an extremely capable, modern surface warfare combatant that provides the PLAN with a strengthened and growing blue water capability. The PLAN will no longer be limited in its range of operations, dependent upon land-based air defense coverage. The Type 052D DDG can stand alone and defend itself from multiple threats. It is a great ASW and AAW platform for fleet defense and will be instrumental in development of a modern Chinese aircraft carrier battle group. With the acquisition of an aircraft carrier, and with a second currently being built, as well as three type 052D DDGs (of 12) and four Type 071 LPDS (of 6) China has built a formidable access/area denial capability to reinforce its claims in the South China Sea. It is important to note that China has gained this capability in just the past decade. Additional vessels of smaller displacement such as the Type 054A Class frigate and Type 056 Class corvette have also been built in large numbers in the same time period.

As nations with conflicting claims in the South China Sea are faced with going into battle against a Chinese navy that has exponentially grown in size and capability, they may see military confrontation as exceedingly futile. A naval alliance of opposing claimants has been building in response, with Vietnam and the Philippines joining forces with non-claimant nations such as Indonesia, Australia and the United States. An added urgency has recently manifested itself in recent “freedom of navigation” operations on the part of this alliance, with both the U.S. and now Australia flying aircraft over Chinese island building projects in the Spratly Islands. Tensions are increasing with the U.S. sending the Arleigh Burke Class USS Lassen DDG-82 and a number of flights of aircraft, including B-52 strategic bombers within twelve miles of the islands.

If China can avoid being drawn into a conflict early on, and gain the time required to establish its artificial island bases in the region and complete the commissioning of the modern naval vessels already being built, the nation will be at a distinct advantage. China has the resources, ingenuity and manpower to win a naval arms race with its neighbors. Chinese ability to control access to the South China Sea and effectively control this entire area is just a matter of time.

Written by Brian Kalman  for SouthFront: Analysis & Intelligence. Brian Kalman is a management professional in the marine transportation industry. He was an officer in the US Navy for eleven years. He currently resides and works in the Caribbean.

A remarkable period of success for Russia and China has come in the efforts of developing their advanced navies. This occurs to be a problem for America’s naval supremacy at a time when the US Navy is trying to adapt to the changing security environment, US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson said.

“For the first time in 25 years, the United States is facing a return to great power competition. Russia and China both have advanced their military capabilities to act as global powers,” he stated in a report, titled “A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority.”

The document, released on January 5,  commented on the other countries that are trying to acquire “advanced technology, including military technologies that were once the exclusive province of great powers.” Richardson listed North Korea, Iran’s “advanced missiles, proxy forces and other conventional capabilities,” as well as international terrorist organizations as a threat to the US.

“Coupled with a continued dedication to furthering its nuclear weapons and missile programs, North Korea’s provocative actions continue to threaten security in North Asia and beyond,” the document stated.

According to Richardson’s document Russia and China command a ‘growing arsenal of high-end warfighting capabilities’, designed to exploit the US Navy’s ‘vulnerabilities’ and ‘to leverage the maritime, technological and information systems,’ the document noted.

The document also comments on the fact that both of the countries ‘continue to develop and field information-enabled weapons, both kinetic and non-kinetic, with increasing range, precision and destructive capacity.’

“The Russian Navy is operating with a frequency and in areas not seen for almost two decades, and the Chinese PLA(N) is extending its reach around the world,” the report added.

On January 6,  Pyongyang announced that North Korea successfully tested a hydrogen bomb. Russia considered the action as an violation of international law and urged all stakeholders to look for a diplomatic solution to the issue.

President Abraham Lincoln rendered the Union marble from rather haphazardly made brick.  It took the most vicious of civil wars on US soil to make a mystique of it. But the tensions between the central government and fractious peripheries within the US did not dissipate.  The US remains a complex entity of disparate factions, held together tenuously by the ideals of the Republic.

Since the weekend, armed militants have held sway in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon, with an intention of staying on “for several years”.  Some stem from Harney County, including Ammon Bundy, son of a Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy who won a 2014 standoff with officers over the use of federal land (The Guardian, Jan 4).

The refuge itself was seized by militia stemming from the Nevadan Bundy family (Ryan and Ammon); Montana electrician Ryan Payne; and Jon Ritzheimer and Blaine Cooper, both of whom hail from Arizona.

Ostensibly, the occupying militants seek the release of two local ranchers, father Dwight and son Steven Hammond.  Both were convicted of arson on federal land.  But much more seems to be at stake, with the whiff of the vigilante challenging authority coming to the fore. This was in evidence with the march on Harney County courthouse in the name of the Hammonds.  Customary symbols of authority were rebuked, with the courthouse and the sheriff’s office pelted with coins.

What Harney County sheriff David Ward saw was far more than a protest specific to the release of two ranchers whom the protesters felt had been hard done by.  At stake was something of an anti-Occupy Movement, a reactionary effort to destabilise the federal compact in the name of an anti-environment, and populist land rights agenda.  “These men had alternative motives to attempt to overthrow the country and federal government in hopes to spark a movement across the United States.”

Ammon Bundy is certainly doing nothing to dissuade detractors of the broader mission.  “This will become a base place for patriots from all over the country.  We’re the point of the spear that’s going to bring confidence and strength to the rest of the people.”

The refuge, deemed an ornithological paradise, is the purposeful point of Bundy’s spear. It is the area which President Theodore Roosevelt declared protected in 1908 – a federally intrusive move that the militia can only see as negative.  (It was, however, far more negative to the first nations who were effectively dispossessed by a conservationist ideal.)[1]  According to these protestors, occupying the refuge and returning it to that nebulous consciousness of the rancher, the logger and the miner “would restore a poor region to prosperity”.

At the core of this vision is nostalgia, one which has been violated and stolen by Washington.  It is, in a sense, a joust between thieves and appropriators of territory, a dispute about who should control land that is deemed, miraculously, theirs.  The federal government undoubtedly holds sway, being the largest landholder and effectively the greatest conquistador of all.

“The government has beaten us and oppressed us and took everything from us,” claimed Cooper.  They, argue the militia members, own the land which needs to be leased, with loggers, ranchers, farmers and miners reliant on such arrangements.

The disintegrating family farm is the flashpoint of impersonal economic forces that have exerted their victimising pull on ranching. Agriculture has been heavily industrialised; environmental conditions such as drought have also taken their toll. Much American stuffing has been knocked out of the manufacturing and agricultural industries over the last three decades, victims of free trade ideology.  Paired with a colonisation narrative, the interior parcelled out by banking and mining interests, and various grievances become potential flashpoints.

This Oregon militia fling may well be dismissed as some inane prattlers with a good degree of exhibitionism to boot.  There is even an argument to be made that the actions are seditious, if not down right terroristic.[2]

How Bundy and his men will be able to stay “for several years” on the refuge, developing its prosperity, is by no means clear.  But the butt of their grievances in certain respects is harder to dismiss.  However artificial the anti-federal rhetoric may seem, the insistence on open rights in terms of recreation and grazing could just as well be a manifestation of libertarian bliss or agrarian socialist utopia.

As for a suitable response, Federal authorities have shown themselves ill-prepared and brutal in attempting to combat militancy in the past. The Waco disaster of 1993 casts a very long shadow indeed, with the spirit of David Koresh lingering as a terrible reminder about the costs of aggressive, centralised power.  It is also hard to get past the fact that such a militia seizure, had been framed along the lines of Islamic State rhetoric, or a Black Panther narrative, would have been treated with a similar degree of reservation.

The Bundy crew remain somewhat spoiled in their indignation, irritants who have so far have been kept at a distance, to be possibly prosecuted at a later date.  Ryan insists that the situation is grave enough to warrant a willingness “to kill and be killed if necessary.”  Certainly, when consulting such sites as that of the Oregon Militia Alliance, one is struck by prevalent tin can paramilitarism in the name of being a good American citizen.[3]

Eventually, this militia account will be re-incorporated into the language of the Union.  Ronald Reagan gave the impression he was on the side of the Sagebrush rebellion which seems to have been channelled into this latest Oregon “occupation”.  Then, as now, the issue was who had entitlements to use land. Naturally, other landholders – primarily indigenous – were the great absentees from the debate.  The language of theft tends to be jaundiced.

All that happened once Reagan took the White House was that land rights were privatised, with ranching rights limited. The source of grief shifted from the government official to the private land holder. Such revolts, as ever, end up dying in circular fashion.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]

Government corruption has become rampant:

• Senior SEC employees spent up to 8 hours a day surfing porn sites instead of cracking down on financial crimes

• Nuclear Regulatory Commission workers watch porn instead of cracking down on unsafe conditions at nuclear plants

• An EPA employee who downloaded 7,000 porn files, then spent 2-6 hours each workday watching porn. He’s been doing it for years … but the EPA never fired him. Another EPA employee harassed 16 women co-workers … and then was promoted to a higher-paying job with more responsibility, where he harassed more women

• NSA spies pass around homemade sexual videos and pictures they’ve collected from spying on the American people

• NSA employees have also been caught using their mass surveillance powers to spy on love interests, such as girlfriends, obsessions or former wives … and to eavesdrop on American soldiers’ intimate conversations with their wives back home. And see this (“routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted” … “‘Hey, check this out … there’s good phone sex’”)

• An employee of the Transportation Security Administration admitted that TSA agents share – and laugh at – nude scans of passengers. Another TSA employee says that screeners make excuses so they can grope and fondle travelers that they’re attracted to (maybe that’s why the TSA failed to find mock explosives or banned weapons going through checkpoints in 95% of trials)

• Investigators from the Treasury’s Office of the Inspector General found that some of the regulator’s employees surfed erotic websites, hired prostitutes and accepted gifts from bank executives … instead of actually working to help the economy

• The Minerals Management Service – the regulator charged with overseeing BP and other oil companies to ensure that oil spills don’t occur – was riddled with “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity”, which included “sex with industry contacts”

• Agents for the Drug Enforcement Agency had dozens of sex parties with prostitutes hired by the drug cartels they were supposed to stop (they also received money, gifts and weapons from drug cartel members)

• Drug Enforcement agents also RAN New Jersey’s sleaziest strip club – using illegal, undocumented girls – which included a prostitution ring

• Pentagon employees used government credit cards to pay for adult “escorts” (i.e. prostitutes) and to gamble

• North Carolina passed a law LEGALIZING PROSTITUTES for state lawmakers.

• Federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Secret Service investigating Bitcoin money laundering extorted and stole over $1 million in Bitcoin

• The IRS gave promotions to employees who were themselves tax cheats

• The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has conspired with big banks to manipulate commodities prices for decades

• The government-sponsored rating agencies committed massive fraud (and see this)

• The Treasury department allowed banks to “cook their books”

• Regulators knew of and allowed the use of debt-hiding accounting tricks by the big banks

• The SEC has been shredding Wall Street documents for decades to help the big banks cover up their fraud

• The Secretary of Treasury (Tim Geithner) was complicit in Lehman’s accounting fraud, (and see this)

• The former chief accountant for the SEC says that Bernanke and Paulson broke the law and should be prosecuted

• The government knew about mortgage fraud a long time ago. For example, the FBI warned of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud in 2004. However, the FBI, DOJ and other government agencies then stood down and did nothing. See this and this. For example, the Federal Reserve turned its cheek and allowed massive fraud, and the SEC has repeatedly ignored accounting fraud (a whistleblower also “gift-wrapped and delivered” the Madoff scandal to the SEC, but they refused to take action). Indeed, Alan Greenspan took the position that fraud could never happen

• Paulson and Bernanke falsely stated that the big banks receiving Tarp money were healthy when they were not. The Treasury Secretary also falsely told Congress that the bailouts would be used to dispose of toxic assets … but then used the money for something else entirely

• The D.C. politicians said that the giant failed banks couldn’t be nationalized, because that would be socialism. Instead of temporarily nationalizing them and then spinning them off to the private sector – or breaking them up – the politicians have bailed them out to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars each year, and created a system where all of the profits are privatized, and all of the losses socialized

• Obama and Congress promised help for struggling homeowners, and passed numerous bills that they claimed would rescue the little guy. But every single one of these bills actually bails out the banks … and doesn’t really help the homeowner

• Many D.C. politicians pay lip service to helping the little guy … while pushing policies which have driven inequality to levels surpassing slave-owning societies

• A high-level Federal Reserve official says quantitative easing is “the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time”

• The American government’s top official in charge of the bank bailouts wrote, “Americans should lose faith in their government. They should deplore the captured politicians and regulators who distributed tax dollars to the banks without insisting that they be accountable. The American people should be revolted by a financial system that rewards failure and protects those who drove it to the point of collapse and will undoubtedly do so again.”

• Bailout funds were not used to help Main Street or the little guy. Instead, the government threw money at “several billionaires and tens of multi-millionaires”, as well as hedge funds, giant corporations like McDonald’s and Harley-Davidson, and numerous foreign banks, including Gaddafi’s Libyan bank, the Arab Banking Corp. of Bahrain, and the Banks of Bavaria, Korea and Mexico

• The regulators pretend that they are being tough on the big banks. But – instead of doing the right thing – they’ve done everything they can to help COVER UP THEIR SINS

• The non-partisan Government Accountability Office calls the Fed corrupt and riddled with conflicts of interest

• Nobel prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz says the World Bank would view any country which had a banking structure like the Fed as being corrupt and untrustworthy. The former vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said said he worried that the failure of the government to provide more information about its rescue spending could signal corruption. “Nontransparency in government programs is always associated with corruption in other countries, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t be here,” he said

• Arguably, both the Bush and Obama administrations broke the law by refusing to close insolvent banks

• Congress may have covered up illegal tax breaks for the big banks

• Congress recently told the courts that Congress can’t be investigated for insider trading

• Congress has exempted itself from the healthcare rules it insists everyone else follow

• State lawmakers are routinely wined and dined by corporate lobbyists who literally TELL THEM what laws to pass

• Police have been busted framing numerous innocent people

• Systemic corruption at the FBI lab led to the EXECUTION of innocent people

• Police raise money by handing out tickets … and they’re given quotas by their bosses. And see this

• Law enforcement also grabs massive amounts of people’s cash, cars and property … even when people aren’t CHARGED with – let alone convicted of – any crime

• Private prisons are huge profit-making centers for giant companies, and private prison corporations obtain quotas from the government, where the government guarantees a certain number of prisoners at any given time

• The government has gone to great lengths to cover up nuclear accidents, radiation dangers, and unsafe conditions at nuclear plants

• The government made sure that false claims were made about the amount of oil spilled by BP in the Gulf

• The government covered up the health risks to New Orleans residents associated with polluted water from hurricane Katrina, and FEMA covered up the cancer risk from the toxic trailers which it provided to refugees of the hurricane. The Centers for Disease Control – the lead agency tasked with addressing disease in America – covered up lead poisoning in children in the Washington, D.C. area (the Centers for Disease Control has also been outed as receiving industry funding)

• The government’s response to the outbreak of mad cow disease was simple: it STOPPED TESTING for mad cow, and PREVENTED cattle ranchers and meat processors from VOLUNTARILY testing their own cows (and see this and this)

• In response to new studies showing the substantial dangers of genetically modified foods, the government passed legislation more or less PUSHING IT onto our plates

• Government scientists originally pushed fluoridation of water as “safe and effective” because fluoride is a major byproduct of making nuclear weapons … and the government ordered them to downplay the risks of fluoride exposure in order to prevent massive lawsuits by those suffering injury from poisoning

• When one of the most respected radiologists in America – the former head of the radiology department at Yale University – attempted to blow the whistle on the fact that the FDA had approved a medical device manufactured by General Electric because it put out massive amounts of radiation, the FDA installed spyware to record his private emails and surfing activities (including installing cameras to snap pictures of his screen), and then used the information to smear him and other whistleblowers

• The EPA colluded with Dow Chemical to toss aside Dow’s own safety studies showing that the Agent Orange ingredient 2,4-D caused kidney damage in rats, so it could approve an increase of 4100% of 2,4-D in the American diet

• In an effort to protect Bank of America from the threatened Wikileaks expose of wrongdoing – the Department of Justice told Bank of America to a hire a specific hardball-playing law firm to assemble a team to take down WikiLeaks (and see this)

• The Bush White House worked hard to smear CIA officers, bloggers and anyone else who criticized the Iraq war

• The FBI smeared top scientists who pointed out the numerous holes in its anthrax case. Indeed, the head of the FBI’s investigation agrees that corruption was rampant

• After a top USDA scientist disclosed that commonly-used pesticides kill monarch butterflies and beneficial insects, the government punished him and tried to make his life miserable

• Senior judges in Pennsylvania have pleaded guilty to falsely convicting and imprisoning hundreds of YOUTHS (they got kickbacks from the prisons). The Pennsylvania Supreme Court refused to hear a case regarding the corrupt judges. A month later – only after the judges confessed to criminal wrongdoing – did the Supreme Court change its mind and take any interest

• The government has intentionally whipped up hysteria about terrorism for cynical political purposes. For example, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge admitted that he was pressured to raise terror alerts to help the president win reelection (and the biggest terrorism fearmongers themselves actually support terrorism. And see this)

• Warmongers in the U.S. government knowingly and intentionally lied us into a war of aggression in Iraq. The former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – the highest ranking military officer in the United States – said that the Iraq war was “based on a series of lies”. The same is true in Libya, Syria and other wars. Indeed, the U.S. has often launched or proposed launching wars based upon FALSE PREMISES

• The U.S. has befriended the main backers of Islamic terrorism … because they have a lot of oil and do our government’s dirty work. In the name of fighting terrorism, the U.S. has been directly supporting Al Qaeda and other terrorists and providing them arms, money and logistical support in Syria, Libya, Mali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iran, and many other countries … both before and after 9/11. And see this
• Conservatives like the director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan (Lt. General William Odom)  and liberals like Noam Chomsky all say that the American government is the WORLD’S LARGEST purveyor of terrorism

• When the American government got caught assassinating innocent civilians, it changed its definition of “enemy combatants” to include all young men – between the ages of say 15 and 35 – who happen to be in battle zones. When it got busted killing kids with drones, it changed the definition again to include kids as “enemy combatants”

• U.S. government officials say that the government has long PROTECTED drug cartels

• $8.5 TRILLION dollars in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 has NEVER been accounted for. The military wastes and “loses” trillions of dollars. And Congress pushes expensive boondoggles that our generals say are unnecessary and unhelpful … because it’s pork for their district

• The government lied when it said it doesn’t conduct mass surveillance on Americans, and then lied again when it said that spying was aimed at protecting America against terrorists.  The highest-level NSA whistleblower in history says that a recently-passed bill authorizing mass surveillance is “just another example of corruption“

• Why do the intelligence agencies spy on innocent Americans? Because they rake in the dough when they do.  Why do so many in Congress support NSA spying? Because NSA contractors give them money

• The same Congress members who backed mass surveillance against the American people have only become indignant only when they were spied on by the government

• The government also lied when it said America doesn’t torture (and see this), and then lied once again when it said torture was aimed at protecting America against terrorists

• The government protects criminal wrongdoing by prosecuting whistleblowers. The Obama administration has sentenced whistleblowers to dozens of times the jail time of all other presidents COMBINED). And the government has framed whistleblowers with false evidence

• The government treats journalists who report on government corruption as CRIMINALS OR TERRORISTS. And it goes to great lengths to smear them. For example, when USA Today reporters busted the Pentagon for illegally targeting Americans with propaganda, the Pentagon launched a SMEAR CAMPAIGN against the reporters. But  journalists who act as mere cheerleaders for the government who never criticize are protected and rewarded

• The intelligence services BLACKMAIL people in both government and the private sector with evidence of homosexuality, nude pictures and other information that people want to stop from going public

• Terror attacks such as 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing and the Texas shooting all happened because of PERVASIVE CORRUPTION in our intelligence agencies

The biggest companies own the D.C. politicians. Indeed, the head of the economics department at George Mason University has pointed out that it is unfair to call politicians “prostitutes”. They are in fact pimps … selling out the American people for a price.

Government regulators have become so corrupted and “captured” by those they regulate that Americans know that the cop is on the take. Institutional corruption is killing people’s trust in our government and our institutions.

Neither the Democratic or Republican parties represent the interests of the American people. Elections have become nothing but scripted beauty contests, with both parties ignoring the desires of their own bases.

Indeed, America is no longer a democracy or republic … it’s officially an oligarchy. And the allowance of unlimited campaign spending allows the oligarchs to purchase politicians more directly than ever.

No wonder polls show that the American people say that the system is so thoroughly corrupt that government corruption is now Americans’ number one fear.

And politicians from both sides of the aisle say that corruption has destroyed America. And see this.

Moreover, there are two systems of justice in America … one for the big banks and other fatcats … and one for everyone else. Indeed, Americans have less access to justice than Botswanans … and are more abused by police than Kazakhstanis.

Big Corporations Are Also Thoroughly Corrupt

But the private sector is no better … for example, the big banks have literally turned into criminal syndicates engaged in systemic fraud.

Wall Street and giant corporations are literally manipulating every single market.

And the big corporations are cutting corners to make an extra penny … wreaking havoc with their carelessness. For example:

• Fracking companies dumped 3 billion gallons of highly-toxic waste into California’s drinking water supply. Fracking is polluting water all over the country. A study published in the journal Ground Water predicts that the highly-toxic fluids used in fracking can migrate to aquifers within a few short years. In addition, it is now official that fracking can cause earthquakes. Yet fracking companies are using military psychological operations techniques to discredit opponents (and see this)

• U.S. military contractors have pocketed huge sums of money earmarked for humanitarian and reconstruction aid. And see this (whistleblowers alerted the government about the looting of Iraq reconstruction funds, but nothing was done)

• General Electric and other nuclear companies KNEW their designs were faulty and unsafe … but hid that fact for decades

• Monsanto has claimed for decades that Roundup is safe, but the World Health Organization just said that it probably causes cancer. Monsanto forbids independent scientists from testing its GMO crops for safety, attacks the computers of people who oppose GMO foods and sue small farmers when Monsanto GMO crops drift onto their fields

• Big farmers are drenching their crops with Roundup right before harvest … to save a buck

• Big food companies work hand-in-glove with the government to dish up unhealthy food

• BP’s criminal negligence led to the giant Gulf oil spill

• There is systemic corruption among drug companies, scientific journals, university medical departments, and medical groups which set the criteria for diagnosis and treatment

(Further examples here, here, here, here and here.)

We’ve Forgotten the Lessons of History

The real problem is that we need to learn a little history:

• We’ve known for thousands of years that – when criminals are not punished – crime spreads

• We’ve known for hundreds of years that the failure to punish financial fraud destroys economies, as it destroys all trust in the financial system

• We’ve known for centuries that powerful people – unless held to account – will get together and steal from everyone else

Beyond Partisan Politics

Liberals and conservatives tend to blame our country’s problems on different factors … but they are all connected.

The real problem is the malignant, symbiotic relationship between big corporations and big government.

The United Nations Security Council will discuss delivery of weapons from Turkey to Syria on Tuesday at Russia’s request, Uruguay’s Permanent Representative to UN Elbio Rosselli, who is presiding over the UN Security Council in January, told journalists on Monday. He added that the meeting would take place behind the closed doors.

“Yes. The question of delivery of (weapons) across the Turkish-Syrian border will be raised tomorrow (Tuesday) as part of the general discussion. The consultations will take place at Russia’s request,” the diplomat told TASS.

According to Rosselli, Jeffrey Feltman, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, is to deliver a report.

In December 2015, Vladimir Safronkov, Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, said that Moscow was extremely concerned with the ongoing arms supplies to Syria and the penetration of terrorists into the country via the U.N.-monitored checkpoints at which U.N. observers are supposed to check the relief cargoes.

Safronkov said that Russia had suggested applying the U.N. monitoring mechanisms to all the cargoes bound for Syria, including those declared as relief cargoes. However, the United Nations Security Council ignored the Russian initiative as it was preparing Resolution 2258, which authorizes the delivery of relief cargoes to the conflict-stricken areas in Syria directly from the territories of neighbouring countries until January 10, 2017.

Apparently the year 2015 marks the beginning of the new IMF interior revolution. First the incorporation of the yuan into the SDR’s was approved, the reserve basket created in 1969 to serve as a supplement of member nations’ official reserves. And now, thanks to approval from the US Congress, the IMF will finally be able to implement the reform of the quotas representation system, China and other emerging countries will increase their power in decision-making, whilst European countries will lose relevance. However, it is still too early to conclude that this is a radical transformation of the correlation of forces inside the IMF: The United States will retain its powers of veto.

The United States seem to have finally understood that in order to keep its global leadership, it is more counterproductive to repudiate the growing role of China and other emerging powers than it is to share the responsibilities of international financial management. For this reason, and very regretfully, Washington has had no other alternative but to grant important concessions to its adversaries through the International Monetary Fund (IMF)[1].

In the first instance, the last week of November, the IMF decided to incorporate the yuan into the Special Drawing Rights (SDR), the reserve currency basket created at the end of the 1960s in order to supplement the official reserves of its members. Although inside the Fund several American officials were opposed from the beginning, at the end of the day Beijing committed itself to moving forward with the liberalization of its financial sector.

Until now the People’s Bank of China has signed nearly forty bilateral currency swaps agreements. This year the central banks of Surinam, South Africa and Chile have started promoting among their companies the abandonment of the dollar. To an increasing extent, the yuan is substituting the US currency in the Asian Giant’s commercial exchanges.

This strategy has allowed the yuan to become the second most used currency in commercial financing and the fourth in cross-border payments, according to numbers from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT)[2]. And sooner rather than later the Chinese currency will be fully convertible, that means, freely exchangeable in the market place.

Thus Communist Party leaders [of China] managed to break down the suspicions of executive IMF director Christine Lagarde: from the 1st of October 2016 the yuan will become the third most important currency in SDR composition[3]. The “people’s currency” (‘renminbi’) will have greater economic weight in IMF currency basket composition compared with Japanese yen and pound sterling, although it will still be under the euro and the dollar.

Secondly, last Friday 18th December, the US Congress gave the green light to the IMF to implement quotas representation system reform. Without a doubt, it is the most important change inside the IMF since 1944, the year when the Bretton Woods agreements were built. The new quotas distribution also means a significant breathing to the Fund in legitimacy terms.

After the 2008 economic collapse it was evident that the IMF did not have enough resources to face this lack of liquidity. No sovereign state had the intention of asking for its help. The IMF was decried following its action during the debt crisis in Latin America and South West Asia: It had shown that it was operating as the armed branch of the US Treasury Department, not as a multilateral fund responsible for stabilizing the balance of its adherents’ payments.

Thus, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was the IMF managing director between 2007 and 2011, convinced emerging countries to make new goals in exchange for the quota increase. The IMF Executive Board supported the proposal in 2010 within the framework of the 15th Major Overhaul of Quotas[4].

Then the initiative of reform was presented to the Board of Governors (embedded by all its members), to undergo the approval of all of the national parliaments. And then US government claimed its veto power. In order for a decision to be accredited by the Fund, a majority of 85% of the vote is required, and the United States alone counted for 16.7% of the total.

But some days ago, after five years of fervent opposition from the US Congress the inertia finally was broken. Quota system reformation will be a reality. Resources available to the IMF have doubled, and they will increase to 659.67 billion US dollars. It is worth stressing that the quota assigned to a country determines the maximum level of its financial commitments to the IMF and its number of votes in the institution, and is a factor determines its access to IMF finances.

The greatest progress corresponds to China, whose right to vote will change from 3.8% to 6%, therefore, it will be the third most powerful country, behind the United States and Japan. Brazil has risen four positions, while India and Russia have entered into the lost of the top ten most powerful. However, European assignation has fallen. With the exception of Spain’s quota, which will increase from 1.68% to 2%, Germany, France, Italy and United Kingdom will reduce their participation.

“The reforms significantly increase the IMF’s core resources, enabling us to respond to crises more effectively, and also improve the IMF’s governance by better reflecting the increasing role of dynamic emerging and developing countries in the global economy” Lagarde point out in a press release[5].

All out, unfortunately the United States will keep its veto power: its right to vote will just decrease two tenths, from 16.7% to 16.5%. Until now everything seems to say that leaders in Beijing don’t want to confront US domination within IMF, an institution that along it more for more than 70 years, has been the most important “lender of last resort” on a world scale, keeping in kind how many resources it has.

The dispute between China and the United States is just tangent. Beijing has tried to increase its financial influence through its powerful state banks (China Development Bank, China Ex-Im Bank, ICBC, Bank of China, etc.), and through regional development banks in which it takes part: Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)[6], Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS bank (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa acronym)[7].

Both in Asian-Pacific, Africa and in Latin America and Caribbean[8], there is no doubt that China is directly competing with the World Bank and developing regional banks supported by Washington (Asian Development Bank, African Development bank, Inter-American Development Bank, etc.) in the financing of infrastructure projects and projects in the extraction of commodities.

Nevertheless, financial cooperation mechanisms propelled by Beijing provide liquidity to countries in critical stages (liquidity problems), such as the Chiang Mai Initiative (formed by China, Japan, South Korea and ten more ASEAN countries) and the Contingent Reserves Arrangement of BRICS (also known as “mini-IMF”) with scarce monetary resources, they work with the dollar[9], and also depend on IMF endorsement to give loans from a certain limit.

Therefore, even if it is great news for the world that China and some other countries with large Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate have managed to increase their IMF participation and to have two more places among the twenty four in the Executive Board, United States will continues to have a crushing domination.

If Washington does not agree in some detail, even if it is minimal, they will be able to veto any emerging countries’ proposals thanks to their veto power. There is no doubt that in any moment, China should exert pressure to avoid that just one country writes the game rules, a little time…

Ariel Noyola Rodríguez is an economist who graduated from the Autonomous National University of Mexico.

Translation: Ines Condoy Franco.

Source: Russia Today.

This aggressive relic of the Cold War remains in force today, despite being condemned every year at the UN by the international community, even after Havana and Washington opened a new chapter in their bilateral relations December 17, 2014

The Apollo spacecraft landing on the moon, the lifting of the prohibition of alcohol in Mississippi and the end of racial segregation, are the stuff of history books in the United States. However, these three events all postdate the implementation of the economic, political and financial blockade against Cuba.

Many may wonder how it is possible that this relic of the Cold War remains in force today, despite being condemned every year at the UN by the vast majority of the international community, even after Havana and Washington opened a new chapter in their bilateral relations.

The economic damages are estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars, but the human cost of a policy designed to exhaust the Cuban people through hunger and desperation is almost impossible to calculate.

After more than half a century, the main U.S. authorities recognize that this policy has failed to achieve its objectives and it is time to “try something different.”

Experts, academics and politicians from both sides of the Florida Straits spoke to Granma regarding their visions on the future of the blockade and the possibility that its days may be numbered.

The Final Blow

Although the president has broad executive powers to change the application of the blockade, the U.S. Congress is the only body that can eliminate it completely, as the policy has been codified in law since 1996 through the Helms-Burton Act.

The current scenario in the U.S. legislature is tense, with the Republicans, who enjoy a majority in both Houses, strongly opposed to the Democratic executive.

“A policy of over half a century can not be removed at once, it would require an extraordinary consensus which is currently unthinkable in the U.S. Congress, particularly given the phenomenon of political polarization we are witnessing,” Carlos Akira de la Puente, professor and researcher at the Center for Hemispheric and United States Studies (CEHSEU) of the University of Havana, told Granma.

Akira added that it is important to consider is that there are sectors within the Republican ranks that are in favor of removing the blockade, indicating a new approach within this party, traditionally opposed to a rapprochement with Cuba.

President Barack Obama himself acknowledged in a recent interview the growing bipartisan support for a change of policy toward Cuba, opening up the possibility for action by Congress.

U.S. lawyer Robert Muse, specializing in Cuba, recalls that within the U.S. political system, it is much harder to repeal legislation than to approve it. He cites as an example the ruling regarding the Havana Club trademark, which went through Congress as a draft budget bill consisting of hundreds of pages, yet over 20 years later remains in force despite violating international treaties and the attempts to render it ineffective.

“Indifference is the key characteristic of the Congress of the United States,” Muse notes.

Visiting Professor of the Center for Global Affairs of the New York University, Arturo López-Levy, highlights that a “significant blow” could dismantle the blockade completely due to the level of interconnection between the respective parts. “The embargo (blockade) is a half-sunken ship awaiting a torpedo to strike below the waterline.”

López-Levy particular emphasizes that the travel ban to Cuba for U.S. tourists remains in force and is a key component of the policy of aggression toward the island.

Dismantling Step by Step

There are currently several draft bills passing through the U.S. legislature aimed at dismantling aspects of the blockade. The level of support and chances of success vary according to each of these.

“The embargo (blockade) has many layers imposed over time in different laws. I believe some aspects will be lifted sooner than others. For example, the right to travel to Cuba, including as a tourist, could be reestablished before the complete removal of the embargo (blockade) as U.S. citizens have a constitutional right to travel,” U.S. Professor William M. LeoGrande, co-author of the book Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana, stated.

Equally, he assures that the ban on granting credit to Cuba in order to buy food could be lifted as there is strong support from the agricultural lobby.

“The draft bill which is closest to being approved by Congress is that which would allow travel to Cuba. Survey after survey demonstrate how strongly Americans reject this ban. The most recent indicates that 81% of both Democrats and Republicans are opposed,” James Williams, president of Engage Cuba, a bipartisan coalition that lobbies Washington for an end to the blockade, explained.

Cuban Professor and researcher Carlos Alzugaray notes that partial success in regards to travel and agricultural trade are more likely in the medium term as they respond to wide interests and could be argued for in terms of citizens’ rights.

In a recent interview, former Congressman Bill Delahunt, a veteran supporter of rapprochement with Cuba, told Granma that the past can serve to learn lessons and open up holes in the blockade legislation.

He recalled that several decades ago, this issue was not up for discussion and remained dominated by the representatives from Florida, however, various visits by legislators from other states to Cuba and their meetings with Fidel, began to alter the panorama.

Delahunt maintains that the success of the rapprochement, both politically and economically, is key to victory. “If we have here the interests of American traders, they will become allies. They will be our lobbyists.”

“The new stage in the process has had positive impacts on expectations regarding Cuba in the United States and the rest of the world and, of course, encourages interest in relations between the two countries in terms of trade and investment, which will have a progressively far-ranging reach due to the advantages of Cuba – geographic proximity, stability and security with a highly qualified workforce – to mention but a few aspects,” CEHSEU Professor and researcher, Luis René Fernández, stressed.

“These forces interested in expanding their relations with Cuba must increase their pressure on Congress to open up this possibility,” he added.

An Empty Shell

The president of the United States, using his executive powers, has the authority to issue licences that leave the majority of the sanctions against Cuba without practical effect.

To date, Obama has only used these powers to influence a minimal array of elements of the application of the blockade, mainly regarding remittances, the self-employed sector and telecommunications, leaving the bulk of the blockade in place.

Various analysts agree that the chosen sectors are motivated by obvious political interests.

The president has the prerogative to make viable substantial collaboration with Cuba in traditional areas of security, as well as on a new security, educational and health agenda, the use of the air space of both countries, direct travel to Cuba from multiple U.S. cities, environmental protection, the fight against crime and human and drug trafficking, López-Levy outlined.

Likewise, he noted that multilateral cooperation between the two countries is as important as bilateral cooperation. “The greater and more comprehensive the rapprochement between the two countries, the stronger the incentives to consolidate a new strategic U.S. policy toward Cuba.”

However, some analysts note that the President could limit the reach of his executive actions, based on the political scenario. Obama himself has said that he would be “selective and cautious” in this sense.

A key area on which experts agree is that the President could concentrate on modifying aspects that hinder the application of the measures taken thus far.

“In his next decisions he should probably work to remove some of the restrictions that have been most visible in the bilateral negotiations, which could for example be associated to the use of the U.S. dollar, or the ban on granting loans to Cuban enterprises by U.S. banks,” Professor Luis René Fernández indicates.

He adds that the obstacles to monetary and financial relations, as well as investment, will also be among the most important elements on which the Obama administration could act before the end of his term.

The Time of Factor

The time factor is another key aspect of the process underway between Cuba and the United States, with Presidential elections on the horizon and just a little over a year left for Obama in the White House.

In addition, given that the changes in the policy toward Cuba have come from the executive, a president with a different position could reverse what has been done so far.

All analysts we spoke to agreed that the most important thing now is to advance and achieve concrete results.

Professor Luis René Fernández believes that the increase in exchanges and negotiations, while limited by the blockade, is contributing to speeding up the elimination of the policy, as these impact on the view of Cuba both within and outside of the United States.

“We must move forward and demonstrate that we are capable of negotiating and reaching agreement on everything that is in our interest,” Alzugaray stresses.

“While the challenges are great, the socioeconomic conditions of Cuba and the perfecting of its system are clearly being consolidated and progressing; and this is crucial to explaining the course of U.S. policy toward Cuba,” Professor Luis René concluded.

After President François Hollande announced last month that France might deprive dual nationals convicted of terrorism or crimes against the state of French citizenship, the Socialist Party (PS) government is now considering extending that punishment to all French nationals.

This would be a flagrant violation of international law. Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man specifies nationality as a fundamental right of any person, while a 1961 UN convention specifies that member states cannot deprive anyone of their nationality if this makes that person stateless. Indeed, in his announcement, Hollande said that the measure would only apply to dual nationals, in order to avoid making people stateless.

Nonetheless, on Monday, PS Junior Minister for Relations with the Parliament Jean-Marie Le Guen announced that deprivation of citizenship for all nationals was “an element in the debate.” Bruno Le Roux, the chair of the PS fraction in the National Assembly, seemed to go further, issuing an ambiguous call for depriving of French nationality “anyone who turns their weapons against the state.”

Government spokesman Stéphane Le Foll explained, “We will look at various positions and see what we can put on the table. The president and the government are concerned with obtaining a broad majority on a question that is above all the safety of the French people, and which must therefore go beyond the usual divisions.”

This shift even further to the far right is bound up with attempts to solidify the PS majority behind Hollande’s reactionary plans. Initially, layers within the PS felt obliged to emit certain criticisms of deprivation of citizenship; it is a measure associated with the neo-fascist National Front (FN), the Nazi collaborationist regime of Vichy during World War II, and the Holocaust. The Vichy regime infamously used it to deprive thousands of naturalized French Jews of their citizenship and deport them to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps.

Its last prominent use under a parliamentary regime came in February 1940, in the reactionary climate of the opening months of World War II, against the left. At that time, two leaders of the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF), National Assembly deputies Maurice Thorez and André Marty, were denounced as tools of the USSR and deprived of their citizenship.

Now, however, under the pretext that the government is no longer discriminating against dual nationals, broad sections of the PS are moving to support Hollande’s initiative. PS party chairman Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, who previously said that deprivation of nationality for dual nationals was “not an idea of the left,” said this week that it could be considered, “if it was open to all Frenchmen.”

The official conceit that this is a measure directed against French terrorists tied to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which carried out the Charlie Hebdo and November 13 attacks last year in Paris, is a political fraud. The measure does nothing to aid the surveillance or prevention of terrorist attacks. It would only serve to create a layer of individuals permanently deprived of any civil rights and forced to live and work illegally in France.

As the daily Libération wrote, “Indeed, deprivation of nationality can only be imposed after a definitive conviction and after the accused has served his time. This means at least 15 years delay (for terrorism-related crimes) and then an incongruous situation: made stateless, the individual would be marooned in France without papers, probably condemned to remain in this situation. ‘What other country would accept him on its territory?’ asked [Lille University law professor Gilles] Lepoutre.”

Moreover, it seems unlikely that a French Islamist who carried out a terror attack would be subject to deprivation of nationality. All of them—from 2012 Toulouse shooter Mohamed Merah, to the Kouachi brothers and Amédy Coulibaly who perpetrated the Charlie Hebdo/Hyper Cacher attacks, to the November 13 attackers—either were murdered by paramilitary units or fled France.

Rather, the law moves France towards a situation where police could effectively outlaw anyone convicted of an ever-widening range of terrorism-related offenses or of violence against police and other representatives of state power.

Various politicians in and around the PS are still proposing alternatives to deprivation of citizenship. Green leader Jean-Vincent Placé is proposing deprivation of civil rights—a measure applied in the late 19th century to working-class supporters of the 1871 Paris Commune who survived the mass murder of the Communards by the bourgeois government of Versailles.

What is ever clearer, however, is that the PS is seizing upon the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris to try to resolve the deep political crisis in France by shifting the official climate far to the right, and aligning itself with the policies of the FN.

In the period before the November 13 attacks, after the collapse of social-democratic parties like PASOK in Greece and the PSOE in Spain, the PS’s long-term survival was in question. PS Prime Minister Manuel Valls had warned of “the death of the left.” PS policies of austerity and war garnered Hollande the lowest approval ratings of any French president since World War II, and there were questions as to whether the PS would survive next year’s presidential elections.

For the PS, the November 13 attacks were a political godsend, allowing Hollande to declare himself the “war president” and try to fashion broader support for his administration on the basis of law-and-order measures.

The debate on deprivation of nationality is exposing the class content of this policy. As Le Foll’s remarks show, the PS is seeking to “go beyond” the traditional division between left and right—that is to say, to overcome the bourgeoisie’s reticence to employ policies too visibly linked to the heritage of 20th century fascism.

The reactionary pro-capitalist groups that for decades have passed for the left since the 1968 general strike, the petty-bourgeois parties that emerged from the student movement and the PS itself, are completing a historic degeneration. These forces represented, in the final analysis, an alliance between finance capital and sections of the affluent middle class hostile to Marxism. Over decades in which they imposed reactionary policies, starting with the PS presidency of François Mitterrand in 1981, they emerged as a social layer totally alien from the working class.

Now, as the PS’s electoral fortunes collapse, they are veering rapidly onto the terrain of the far right, advocating state illegality and authoritarian forms of rule. The PS announced plans to rule through a permanent state of emergency, which Hollande aims to impose via a constitutional amendment. Beyond this, however, amid the confusion caused by the debate inside the PS and the media over the deprivation of citizenship, a broad series of attacks on democratic rights are being prepared.

The PS is hurriedly drafting a reform of the penal code to strengthen police powers, ostensibly under the pretext of fighting terrorism or organized crime. The law would extend police immunity for the use of deadly force during raids, broaden police powers to search persons and belongings without judicial authorization, and allow police authorities to detain individuals and consign them to house arrest for a month without judicial approval.

The police and the Interior Ministry are seizing enormous powers, effectively doing an end run around the courts and the judicial system. Le Monde wrote that the law’s goal “is clear: to prolong measures authorized by the state of emergency beyond the state of emergency… It points to a basic tendency of successive governments: to marginalize the judiciary, particularly investigating magistrates that are legally independent [from the executive], and replace them with prosecutors, who are named by the government.”

The 4th Media’s Editorial Note:

“In April, [2015] the head of the US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, Admiral William Gortney, said the US military believes Pyongyang is capable of launching an ICBM with a nuclear warhead from a hard-to-track mobile launcher at the US West Coast.” RT

“In a ‘special and important’ announcement at noon, DPRK(North Korean) TV claimed that the country had successfully detonated a miniature hydrogen bomb, marking the country’s fourth known nuclear test.

The announcement followed the detection of an “artificial seismic event” in the vicinity of a known Pyongyang nuclear site.

Mastering a hydrogen nuclear device would be a major breakthrough for North Korea.

The technology allows scaling up the yield of a nuclear device with few limitations.

The claimed miniaturization of a nuclear device may mean that North Korea could soon develop a nuclear warhead for its larger ballistic missiles.

Pyongyang has already claimed it can deliver nuclear strikes on the US mainland, …” RT

Text of official  DPTK press release

Pyongyang, January 6 (KCNA) –  

The DPRK government issued the following statement Wednesday:

The first H-bomb test was successfully conducted in Korea at 10:00 on Wednesday, Juche 105 (2016), pursuant to the strategic determination of the WPK.

Through the test conducted with indigenous wisdom, technology and efforts the DPRK fully proved that the technological specifications of the newly developed H-bomb for the purpose of test were accurate and scientifically verified the power of smaller H-bomb.

It was confirmed that the H-bomb test conducted in a safe and perfect manner had no adverse impact on the ecological environment.

The test means a higher stage of the DPRK’s development of nuclear force.

By succeeding in the H-bomb test in the most perfect manner to be specially recorded in history the DPRK proudly joined the advanced ranks of nuclear weapons states possessed of even H-bomb and the Korean people came to demonstrate the spirit of the dignified nation equipped with the most powerful nuclear deterrent.

This test is a measure for self-defence the DPRK has taken to firmly protect the sovereignty of the country and the vital right of the nation from the ever-growing nuclear threat and blackmail by the US-led hostile forces and to reliably safeguard the peace on the Korean Peninsula and regional security.

Since the appearance of the word hostility in the world there has been no precedent of such deep-rooted, harsh and persistent policy as the hostile policy the US has pursued towards the DPRK.

The US is a gang of cruel robbers which has worked hard to bring even a nuclear disaster to the DPRK, not content with having imposed the thrice-cursed and unheard-of political isolation, economic blockade and military pressure on it for the mere reason that it has differing ideology and social system and refuses to yield to the US’s ambition for aggression.

The Korean Peninsula and its vicinity are turning into the world’s biggest hotspot where a nuclear war may break out since they have been constantly stormed with all nuclear strike means of the US imperialist aggressor troops, including nuclear carrier strike group and nuclear strategic flying corps.

While kicking up all forms of economic sanctions and conspiratorial “human rights” racket against the DPRK with mobilization of the hostile forces, the US has made desperate efforts to block its building of a thriving nation and improvement of the people’s living standard and “bring down its social system”.

The DPRK’s access to H-bomb of justice, standing against the US, the chieftain of aggression watching for a chance for attack on it with huge nukes of various types, is the legitimate right of a sovereign state for self-defense and a very just step no one can slander.

Genuine peace and security cannot be achieved through humiliating solicitation or compromise at the negotiating table.

The present-day grim reality clearly proves once again the immutable truth that one’s destiny should be defended by one’s own efforts.

Nothing is more foolish than dropping a hunting gun before herds of ferocious wolves.

The spectacular success made by the DPRK in the H-bomb test this time is a great deed of history, a historic event of the national significance as it surely guarantees the long-lasting future of the nation.

The DPRK is a genuine peace-loving state which has made all efforts to protect peace on the Korean Peninsula and security in the region from the US vicious nuclear war scenario.

The DPRK, a responsible nuclear weapons state, will neither be the first to use nuclear weapons nor transfer relevant means and technology under any circumstances as already declared as long as the hostile forces for aggression do not encroach upon its sovereignty.

There can neither be suspended nuclear development nor nuclear dismantlement on the part of the DPRK unless the US has rolled back its vicious hostile policy toward the former.

The army and people of the DPRK will steadily escalate its nuclear deterrence of justice both in quality and quantity to reliably guarantee the future of the revolutionary cause of Juche[independent, self-determined, & self-reliant] Korea for all ages.

Juche Korea will be prosperous forever as it holds fast to the great WPK’s line of simultaneously pushing forward the two [both economic and nuclear power] fronts. (emphasis added)

Korea Central News Agency, An Official DPRK News Agency

2016 started with a thud on Monday when news from China sent global stocks into freefall. The Shanghai index plunged 242 points before a system-wide circuit breaker kicked in and trading was halted.  All three major US indices followed Asia’s downward slide with the Dow Jones leading the pack with a triple-digit loss on the day. The news that Chinese manufacturing continued to contract after ten straight months of erosion put the kibosh on any New Years rally as jittery traders dumped stocks at a pace not seen since 2011. The combination of dreary economic data, shrinking profits, dwindling capital investment, sub-par growth, and higher interest rates has put Wall Street in a foul mood foreshadowing a volatile and bumpy year ahead with little cause for celebration.

While the proximate cause of the current turbulence is China’s flagging manufacturing sector, the underlying reasons are even more important, like the dismal state of the US economy which continues to languish in a long-term coma.  Here’s a brief recap from economist Jack Rasmus at CounterPunch:

The real U.S. economy since 2008 has grown at only roughly half to two-thirds its normal rate. Decent paying jobs in manufacturing and construction today are still a million short of 2007 levels. Median wages for non-managers are still below what they were in 2007, and households are piling on new debt again to pay for rising medical costs, rents, autos, and education. Retail sales are slowing. Construction activity is only two-thirds what it was and U.S. manufacturing is contracting again. The gas-oil fracking industrial boom of 2012-2014 – a major source of growth – has ended this past year and mass layoffs in the hundreds of thousands are now occurring in mining, manufacturing and transport. Reflecting the true weakness of the U.S. economy, prices are slowing and are now at a historic low of 1.3 percent and heading lower, as the United States – like Japan and Europe – is drifting toward deflation.  (“Central Banks Out of Control“, Jack Rasmus, CounterPunch)

Rasmus sums it up perfectly.  The Fed’s zero rate stimulus has been a bust for everyone except the investor class which has raked in trillions off monetary programs that were designed to inflate bubbles while the real economy remains stuck in neutral.  It’s particularly interesting that he mentions the “gas-oil fracking industrial boom of 2012-2014”, since virtually all the so-called credit expansion took place in this  capital-intensive industry that is presently in severe crisis due to tumbling oil prices and  reemerging deflation.  Take a look at this chart on Warren Mosler’s excellent website “The Center of the Universe” that follows credit growth since 2001:

So if the Fed’s low rates didn’t touch off a credit expansion among US households and businesses, then what was gained?

Not much really. The high-paying jobs in the oil patch have already dried up leaving the owners with sizable debts on drilling operations that are no longer profitable. As oil prices continue to slump, the price of cash in the junk bond market continues to rise paving the way for a wave of defaults that could domino through the industry.  This is a fairly typical scenario whenever the Fed lowers rates. Investors search frantically for higher yield oftentimes dumping their money into overpriced bonds that provide funding for risky operations that eventually go belly up. The fracking boom is just another example of how cheap money and falling prices can lead to disaster.

Naturally, if you drop the price of money to zero and keep it there for seven years, bad things are going to happen. Speculation is going to increase, investors are going to take on more risks, and the price of stocks and bonds are going to soar. But what doesn’t happen is that ordinary working people who are still trying to reduce their debtload after the last big bust, don’t start borrowing more money and spending like madmen. That hasn’t happened and that won’t happen. The only recovery has been in the stock portfolios of the bank moguls and other filthy-rich investors. Everyone else is still just treading water.

There have been numerous warnings that the Fed’s monetary policies are steering the system towards another financial crisis.  Check out this blurb from  the World Socialist Web Site:

In a report on the state of financial markets issued this week, the Office of Financial Research (OFR), set up by the US Treasury after the 2008 crisis, painted a picture of, in the words of Financial Times economic commentator Gill Tett, a “distinctly distorted American financial system” resulting from seven years of ultra-low interest rates.

The OFR said that “credit risk in the US non-financial business sector is elevated and rising.” It went on to warn that “higher base rates may create refinancing risks… and potentially precipitate a broader default cycle.”

In other words, a situation has been created where a default or a series of defaults in high risk areas could set off a chain reaction in the system as a whole, recalling the effects of the sub-prime mortgage collapse.  (“After Fed rate hike, global economic fault lines deepen”, Nick Beams, World Socialist Web Site)

This is exactly what happened in 2008 when Lehman got into trouble and threatened to take down the entire US banking system along with it.   Now–according to the Office of Financial Research–we’re in the same pickle due to the Fed’s zero rates which have “distinctly distorted” asset prices creating the prospect of another meltdown.

It’s clear the Fed is worried about how all this is going to shake out. Just last week, Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer said that the Fed needed more tools to prevent the financial crash and to contain the fallout should one occur. This is from Bloomberg:

(Fisher) “told the American Economic Association on Sunday that the Fed is not as well-equipped with regulatory powers to rein in housing and other asset bubbles as some other central banks. And he questioned whether Congress had gone too far in limiting the Fed’s ability to intervene if a crisis erupted and threatened the financial system.

“We won’t know until it’s very late” whether the Fed has been constrained too much, Fischer said at the AEA’s annual meeting in San Francisco. That’s something “we have to worry about a great deal.”….

Fischer also contrasted the congressional curbs placed on the Fed’s ability to act as a lender of last resort in a financial emergency …In banking legislation passed in 2010, U.S. lawmakers prohibited the Fed from engaging in rescues of individual financial firms, such as it did with Bear Stearns Cos. and American International Group Inc. during the last meltdown.” (“Fischer Worries Fed Can’t Head Off or Contain Financial Crises“, Bloomberg)

Why would Fisher ask for additional powers if he didn’t see clouds gathering on the horizon?

The Fed is entirely responsible for the condition of the financial markets. They’re the primary regulator and the braintrust behind these experimental programs like QE and zirp (zero interest rate policy). Not surprisingly, they implemented both policies with no idea of an exit strategy. Now they are trying desperately to improvise a way out of the mess that they alone created.   Just look at the way they’re trying to raise interest rates. It’s a completely new procedure that may or may not work, no one really knows. Before the financial crisis, the Fed used to raise the fed-funds rate by simply buying small amounts of securities.  But now that the Fed has flooded the banks with reserves in excess of $2.6 trillion, that’s no longer possible.  Instead, the Fed plans to experiment with reverse repos hoping that it will help them to regain control of the rate-setting mechanism.  Here’s a brief rundown of how it’s supposed to work from the Wall Street Journal:

The Fed has been testing a new tool: the overnight reverse repurchase agreement. These are effectively collateralized loans to the Federal Reserve that temporarily drain excess reserves from government entities or excess cash from money-market funds.This, however, has risks, too. If the Feddoesn’t limit the amount of repurchases, the opportunity of earning risk-free interest at the Fed’s new higher rate could trigger a potentially destabilizing flight from risk assets such as bond mutual funds. Should the Fed set too low a cap, itrisks losing control of overnight borrowing rates.  (“The Fed’s Rate Increase: A New Test Looms“, Wall Street Journal)

So according to the author, the new process for raising rates is:

(a)  Risky and

(b) No one knows if it will work because it’s never been tried before.

That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Fed’s new policy, now is it?

Of course, no one’s going to admit that none of this would have been necessary if the Fed had nationalized the banks and written down their debts when they had the chance in 2008.  Oh, no. Instead, they’re going to keep repeating the same nonsense they’ve been saying for the last eight years, that everything is getting better and that prosperity is just around the corner.  What a laugh. Meanwhile, the financial system continues to edge closer to its inevitable day of reckoning thanks in large part to the efforts of the Fed.

British Special Forces have been deployed in Libya to wrest back control of more than a dozen oil fields seized by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) militants, it has emerged.

Approximately 6,000 European and US soldiers, including 1,000 British troops, will be involved in a number of offensives set up to halt the advance of the jihadist terror group.

The operation will be led by Italian forces and supported mainly by Britain and France.

Special Forces, including military close observation experts from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, are spearheading the major coalition offensive against the jihadist group, according to the Daily Mirror.

IS has seized several revenue-boosting oil fields in Libya and is eager to win more control over the country, as the land could provide them with millions of dollars to fund terror attacks.

The terrorist network is now targeting the Marsa al Brega oil refinery, the biggest in North Africa.

If jihadists successfully capture the oil refinery, located between Sirte and Benghazi, they would gain full control of the country’s oil.

Britain’s SAS is working with Libyan commanders to advise them on key “battle-space management” tactics to control the battlefield using troops, tanks, warplanes and navy ships.

They will also send intelligence to Ministry of Defence (MoD) chiefs that could be used to determine whether airstrikes are needed.

A senior military source told the Mirror: “This coalition will provide a wide range of resources from surveillance, to strike operations against Islamic State who have made significant progress in Libya.

We have an advance force on the ground who will make an assessment of the situation and identify where attacks should be made and highlight the threats to our forces.”

“Moreover, the ideologies of jihadism and of political Islam are alive and well. It is far too soon to write off Islamic State and organizations similar to it.

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told IB Times: “In Libya, there is the perfect mix ready to explode and in case it explodes, it will explode just at the gates of Europe.”

The Libya intervention would mark the first time British troops have officially taken part in a direct ground assault against IS.

Libya has been in the throes of a chaotic civil war since the 2011 ousting of longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi. Today, two rival governments and parliaments compete for dominance amid a deepening Islamist insurgency.

More than 5,000 IS extremists are active in the country, according to the Libyan Interior Ministry.

As time passes over the foreign policy of Western nations, the façade of promoting “freedom” and “democracy” passes with it. Even with well-established propaganda mechanisms in place to convince the Western public that NATO involvement in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) serves a noble purpose, there are breaks in the wall of nonsense that passes for official explanations and mainstream media reporting that document the NATO march of terror across the world that is currently underway.

In this case, the lie is that a direct Western presence in Libya is anything other than a return to open colonialism by the very powers who perpetrated it in years past on the very same territory.

The latest crack in the façade (for those paying attention), is the deployment of a joint British-Italian force consisting of 6,000 soldiers to Libya under the guise of defeating ISIS.

It is estimated that there are around 4,000 ISIS fighters present in Libya at the moment and that these fighters pose a significant threat to the national security of European nations as well as a number of oil fields located in Libya.

As Colin Freeman writes for the Telegraph,

Pressure for British troops to be deployed against Islamic State militants in Libya grew on Monday after the terror group attempted to seize the country’s largest oil depot.

At least two people were killed when Isil fighters launched a combined gun and suicide car bomb attack on the Sidra oil port on Libya’s Mediterranean coast. A rocket fired into a 420,000 barrel oil tank also sparked a huge blaze.

Sidra lies around 130 miles east along the coast from the late Colonel Gaddafi’s home city of Sirte, where Isil first raised its black jihadist flag a year ago.

The prospect of Isil also grabbing lucrative oil facilities will increase pressure on Britain to press ahead with a plan to send troops to help Libya’s fledgling government push Isil out.

Libya was “offered help” by Britain provided that the two separate Libyan governments – the more secular House of Representatives and the Islamist General National Congress – form a unity government, which both parties did shortly before Christmas.

It is noteworthy that the British press reported the decision to form a unified government in terms of the deployment of British troops as opposed to the domestic political repercussions in Libya itself.

With the formation of the unity government, British troops, along with Italian ones (notably Libya’s previous colonial controller), are apparently on their way, although the plan appears that it will take a few months to be put in place.

As Freeman reports, “Under the plan, up to 1,000 British troops would form part of a 6,000-strong joint force with Italy – Libya’s former colonial power – in training and advising Libyan forces. British special forces could also be engaged on the front line.”

Regarding the ISIS attack on the Libyan oil facility, Freeman writes that “While Sidra’s oil depot has been out of action for much of the past year because of Libya’s ongoing civil war, capturing it would still have been a major prize for Isil, which has earned millions of dollars from its control of oil facilities in Syria.”

Of course, with the deployment of Italian and British troops to the country, it is both Italy and the UK who are set to hold the oil ports near the Mediterranean coasts with the new Libyan coalition government serving as a mere cover for NATO control, a convenient “coincidence” for the European powers who would love to have control of yet another source of oil, particularly of the Libyan variety.

Clearly, the deployment of British and Italian troops to Libya is nothing more than another geopolitical move designed to gain access to oil and gain strategic footing in North Africa and the Middle East.

The true enemy, from the perspective of NATO is not ISIS. Hence, the deployment of such a small number of troops (6,000 vs 4,000).

The true enemy is national independence and the strategic positioning of Russia, the nation that holds much of Europe by the scruff of the neck when it comes to oil.

Regardless of the manner in which the deployment is being presenting by the Western mainstream press, the truth is that the re-re-invasion of Libya is nothing more than colonialism version 3.0.

Brandon Turbeville is the author of six books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville has published over 500 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

This is our second look at the work of Robert Stuart, concerning the BBC Panorama documentary Saving Syria’s Children. (go here for our first instalment). When did the alleged chemical attacks actually occur? Why do accounts of the timing differ so widely? And why did producer Darren Conway become defensive and incoherent when asked one simple question?

The BBC Panorama documentary Saving Syria’s Children began as quite low key coverage of the work of two British doctors (Rola Hallam and Saleyha Ahsan) visiting the Atareb hospital in Aleppo on August 26 2013. But then – the story goes – completely by chance, while they were filming, there was an incendiary attack (originally described as a “chemical attack”), supposedly by the Syrian government, on the Urem Al-Kubra school 8 or 9 miles away, fortuitously permitting the film crew to get dramatic footage of the victims arriving at the hospital for treatment.

This footage was first aired on BBC’s ten o’clock news on August 29 2013, just as the UK parliament were debating possible military intervention in Syria. As it happens the motion for intervention was unexpectedly defeated by a narrow majority. If this had not happened the BBC’s footage would unquestionably have served as very timely and useful PR in support of the coming war against Assad.

On September 30 2013 the Panorama program Saving Syria’s Children was aired. It included the footage of the alleged chemical/incendiary attack shown a month earlier, though the audio had been altered in slightly curious ways, which we have discussed on OffG earlier. Explanations for why the changes were made have been less than satisfactory at deflecting the suspicion of deliberate attempts at war propaganda.

However, the puzzle of the altered audio is – for Robert Stuart – only one small part of the numerous problems this documentary presents. His website discloses multiple inconsistencies, anomalies and puzzles which combine to imply there is something very seriously not right about the incident as reported, and the footage taken of alleged victims at the scene. We’ll certainly be returning to this important question again and again in coming months, and as always we urge everyone to read Stuart’s own detailed analyses, but here we’ll look at just one small but crucial aspect. The chronology of the alleged chemical attack on the school.

All agree it took place on August 26, but Stuart points out the alleged time of day varies by nearly six hours depending on what source you consult. Human Rights Watch gives the time as “around midday”. The Violations Documentation Centre in Syria put the time of the attack at around 2pm. However Ian Pannell, the reporter on Saving Syria’s Children, has stated the incident happened “around 5.30, at the end of the school day.” While his colleague on the program, director and cameraman Darren Conway, estimated the time to have been “between 3 and 5 o’clock”. Another alleged eyewitness has put the time even later, at around 6pm.

This is a little odd. Particularly curious that the two BBC crew present don’t seem to agree on the timing of the events they not only witnessed but filmed. Can it be explained simply by the confusion inherent in such a catastrophic event? It’s hard to entirely rule out that possibility of course. The alleged victims would have to be transported from the school to the hospital, could this account for the apparent inconsistency? It doesn’t seem probable. The school in Urem al Kubra is less than nine miles from the Atareb hospital, so it seems unlikely the first victims would be arriving three to six hours after the attack.

More curious still, however, is the subsequent response and reactions of the BBC crew to questions on the subject. In October 2014, during an interview at the Frontline Club, Stuart had the opportunity to ask cameraman Darren Conway, from the audience, to clarify his own timeline and explain the apparent anomalies. This is the transcript of that brief exchange:

As we can see, Stuart did not make even the smallest suggestion that the time anomalies called the reality of the event into doubt, yet Conway reacts with defensiveness and a certain amount of confusion. He even begins an incoherent form or rebuttal of an accusation no one had made….

…I mean it kind of makes me sick to my stomach to think [people?] believe that, er, that happens, but that do not happen, but I mean there’s a, there’s a, there’s a big machine that works, erm, that works for the sort of regime as well that tries to sort of er, you know, discredit this sort of stuff so you know I don’t want to really talk about that….

This is a very strange response by Conway, who received an OBE a few months after Saving Syria’s Children aired, and whose reputation has never been called into question over the matter. Why didn’t he just say “I don’t know why HRW said it happened at midday, I was there, so I know when it happened. Period.” His anticipatory defensiveness seems very hard to explain, if indeed events happened as he and his documentary claim.

More oddnesses followed quickly on. Stuart’s brief Q&A took place at the end of an extensive interview with Conway as part of a series called Reflections, run jointly by Frontline and the BBC, in which senior figures in journalism are celebrated. The series has featured such notables as John Pilger and Jon Snow. The event is live streamed on the internet and the video is usually uploaded to Youtube and to the Frontline website shortly afterwards.

But so far, a year after the event, Conway’s interview has not been uploaded. In late 2014 Stuart emailed Frontline’s Programme Editor, Millicent Teasdale to enquire when/if the video would appear. He was told:

A few edits have had to be made to the video for security reasons and I hope to have it online early next year.

But apparently those “few edits” were just impossible to achieve, because in March 2015 the following note appeared on the Frontline website:

Given the event was live streamed on the internet, this seems like rather belated and useless caution. Stuart claims he can only recall two colleagues being mentioned by Conway: Ian Pannell, who presented the Panorama documentary, and whose name is therefore already out there and no secret, and “Saving Syria’s Children’s credited “Fixer/Translator” Mughira Al Sharif, whom Conway very briefly referred to, calling him only “Mughi”.” Is he the colleague so desperately in need of protection? If so, how can it have taken Frontline 12 months and counting to bleep out that one syllable before uploading the interview?

Thank goodness Frontline tells us protecting Conway’s colleagues is “the only reason why DC’s Frontline Club session is being held back”, because otherwise this might have been one of those situations where attempts to conceal, evade or obfuscate only succeed in making those involved look as if they bear some kind of consciousness of wrongdoing.

Until Frontline decide their interview with Darren Conway OBE is finally safe enough to upload, the only record we have of any part of it is the cellphone vidof Stuart’s brief Q&A with Conway. Short as it is, it’s worth watching.

Meanwhile we are left to wonder why a seemingly innocuous question about timing anomalies a) caused Conway to instantly become both defensive and incoherent, and b) seems to have resulted in the entire video of his Reflections interview being pulled from the web for over a year.

For more detailed information please read Stuart’s ownanalysis of these events, and the entire interconnecting mesh of lies, confusions and curiosities underpinning this controversial documentary.

Here media hysteria goes again. This is BBC.

It is very difficult to know what has happened. The media and many governments around the world immediately condemn this test. The EU says it is against UN Security Council resolutions – a council consisting exclusively of much stronger, nuclear powers.

Before we get carried away, it should be pointed out that North Korea’s military expenditures (US$ 7-10 bn and very complicated to calculate, but anyhow) is around 1% of those of the U.S., about 20% of South Korea’s and about 15% of Japan’s.

North Korea’s entire military costs a bit less than the newest single nuclear bomb the U.S. tested last year.

Nuclear weapons remain a huge problem to the world. However, countries that have nuclear weapons themselves focus on proliferation. Humanity focuses on the existence of nuclear weapons. Simply put, as long as there are some who have nuclear weapons, others will try to acquire them.

Mass media that blow this inferior nuclear power’s test of whatever it was up on the front pages but forget to tell their audiences much much more serious nuclear stories are – knowingly or not – part of a militarist propaganda machine. Thereby they promote what I have called MIMAC – the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex.

That should not be the role of any media. It would be to highlight all nuclear activities by any government, get some proportions, highlight how these weapons violate international law and inform the world about both the huge risks and what would happen if they are used and, finally, inform us about the activities for nuclear disarmament and abolition.

Just contributing to “fearology” about a nuclear dwarf and keep us uninformed about the giants militates against objectivity, pluralism and freedom of the press. And it contributes indirectly to militarism.

What are the much more serious nuclear stories I mentioned above?

Well, it has just been revealed that 33,000 U.S. atomic factory workers have died over the last 70 years because of the dangerous environment.

Fact is that nuclear weapons cause many problems even without being used directly – such as the war on Iraq, such as polluting the environment and making larges areas – like in Khazakstan – uninhabitable. There are constant nuclear accidents and the world could be more or less totally destroyed from a single technical or human failure.

And what does the U.S. do with a president who wanted to work for a nuclear-free worldand received the Nobel Peace Prize?

It has decided to spend US$ 1 trillion – i.e. 1000 billion – the next 30 years on new nuclear weapons. Read more about this perverse ‘peace’ policy here.

My work documenting how the law was lost began about a quarter of a century ago. A close friend and distinguished attorney, Dean Booth, first brought to my attention the erosion of the legal principles on which rests the rule of law in the United States. My columns on the subject got the attention of an educational institution that invited me to give a lecture on the subject. Subsequently, I was invited to give a lecture on “How The Law Was Lost” at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York City.

The work coalesced into a book, The Tyranny Of Good Intentions, coauthored with my research associate, Lawrence M. Stratton, published in 2000, with an expanded edition published in 2008. We were able to demonstrate that Sir Thomas More’s warning about prosecutors and courts disregarding law in order to more easily convict undesirables and criminals has had the result of turning law away from being a shield of the people and making it into a weapon in the hands of government. That is what we witness in the saga of the Hammonds, long-time ranchers in the Harney Basin of Oregon.

With the intervention of Ammon Bundy, another rancher who suffered illegal persecution by the Bureau of Land Management but stood them off with help from armed militia, and his supporters, the BLM’s decades long persecution of the innocent Hammonds might have come to a crisis before you read this.

Bundy and militiamen, whose count varies from 15 to 150 in the presstitute media, have seized an Oregon office of the BLM as American liberty’s protest against the frame-up of the Hammonds on false charges. As I write the Oregon National Guard and FBI are on the way.

The militiamen have said that they are prepared to die for principles, and the rule of law is one of them. Of course, the presstitute media is making the militiamen into the lawbreakers—and even calling them terrorists—and not the federal government’s illegal prosecution of the Hammonds, whose crime was their refusal to sell their ranch to the government to be included in the Masher National Wildlife Refuge.

If there are only 15 militiamen, there is a good chance that they will all be killed, but if there are 150 armed militiamen prepared for a shootout, the outcome could be different.

I cannot attest to the accuracy of this report of the situation:

https://www.superstation95.com/index.php/world/723

The resources required to verify the information in this account of how the government escalated a “crisis” out of the refusal of a family to bend is beyond the resources of this website. However, the story fits perfectly with everything Lawrence Stratton and I learned over the years that we prepared our book on how the law was lost. This account of the persecution of the Hammonds is the way government behaves when government has broken free of the rule of law.

I can attest with full confidence that the United States no longer has a rule of law. The USA is a lawless country. By that I do not mean what conservative Republicans mean, which is, if I understand them, that racial minorities violate law with something close to impunity.

What I mean is that only the mega-banks and the One Percent have legal protection, and that is because these people control the government. For everyone else law is a weapon in the hands of the government to be used against the American people.

The fact that the shield of law no longer exists for American citizens is why, according to US Department of Justice statistics, only 4 percent of federal felonies ever go to trial. Almost the entirety of federal felonies are settled by coerced plea bargains that force defendants to admit to crimes that they did not commit in order to avoid “expanded indictments” that, if presented to the typical stupid, trusting, gullible American “jury of their peers,” would lock them away for hundreds of years.

American justice is a joke. It does not exist. You can see this in the American prison population. “Freedom and Democracy” America not only has the largest percentage of its population in prison than any country on the planet, but also the largest number of prisoners.

If you consider that “authoritarian” China has four times the population of the United States but fewer prisoners, you understand that “authoritarian” China has a more protective rule of law than the United States.

Compared to “freedom and democracy America,” Russia has hardly anyone in prison. Yet, Washington and its media whores have defined the President of Russia as “the new Hitler.”

The only thing we can conclude from the facts is that the United States Government and those ignorant fools who worship it are evil incarnate.

Out of evil comes dictatorship. The White House Fool, at best a two-bit punk, has decided that he doesn’t like the Second Amendment to the US Constitution any more than he likes any of the other constitutional protections of US citizens. He is looking for dictatorial methods, that is, unlegislated executive orders, to overturn the Second Amendment. He has the corrupt US Department of Justice, a criminal organization, looking for ways for the dictator to overturn both Congressional legislation and Supreme Court rulings.

The media whores have fallen in line with the would-be dictator. All we hear is “gun violence.” If only Karl Marx were still with us. He would ridicule those who turn inanimate objects into purposeful actors. It is extraordinary that the American left-wing thinks that guns, not people, kill people.

The position of the “progressive left-wing” in the United States is perplexing. Here are Americans, immersed into a police state, as are the Hammonds, and the progressive left-wing wants to disarm the population.

Whatever this “progressive left-wing opposition” is, it has nothing in common with revolutionaries. The American left-wing is totally irrevelant, a defeated force that sold out and no longer represents the people or the truth.

Even more astonishing, judging by comments on RT’s report on the situation and the readers comments, all RT and American blacks want to know is where is the National Guard in Oregon? Why isn’t it called out against the White militia protests as it was called out against the Black Ferguson protests?

https://www.rt.com/usa/327809-bundy-militia-oregon-reaction/ 

If protesting the murder of a young black American by Ferguson police is not legitimate and the protesters are “terrorists,” why aren’t the Oregon protestors terrorists for trying to protect jailbirds from their “lawful sentence”? This is the wrong question.

It really is discouraging that the American black community is unable to understand that if any American can be dispossessed, all Americans can be dispossessed.

It is also discouraging that RT decided to play the race card instead of comprehending that law is no longer a shield of the American people but is a weapon in the hands of Washington.

Why doesn’t RT at least listen to the President of Russia, who states repeatedly that America and the West are lawless.

Putin is correct. America and its vassals are lawless. No one is safe from the government.

Central banks – including the Bank of Japan, Bank of Israel, Bank of Switzerland and the Czech Republic– have been buying stocks to prop up their nations’ stock markets.

We’ve noted for years that Fed policy is aimed at boosting stocks, as well.

Today, the decade-long former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas – a voting member of the the Fed’s principal monetary policymaking group (the Federal Open Market Committee) – admitted (CLICK full interview):

What The Fed did, and I was part of it, was front-loaded an enormous rally starting in 2009 … in order to create a wealth effect…

I wouldn’t blame [the declining stock market]  on China.

***

An uncomfortable digestive period is likely now.

Indeed, only higher income brackets ever liked the Fed’s “wealth effect” policies.

Critiquing Bernie Sanders from the left can be a lonely project. There is a “hope”-powered hysteria surrounding his campaign, and bursting the “hope” bubble can produce a fierce backlash. The Sanders “hope” explosion is so fierce because capitalism has become a hopeless place.

Hope can be positive by pushing people into political action, but it’s also exploited by the establishment as shiny bait. Obama, for example, fished for votes using “hope” and reeled in the presidency.

He then clubbed “hope” senseless by betraying his promises, continuing war and maintaining the domestic policies of the 1%. Hope was so thoroughly thrashed that a new messiah of hope was needed to cure the Obama-fortified hopelessness.

Bernie’s version of hope is deeper than Obama’s shallow PR electoral campaign, but under capitalism real “hope” isn’t a simple recipe, and Bernie is missing some key ingredients, most notably “anti-imperialism,” which is exemplified in Bernie’s reactionary foreign policy positions.

Imperialism can be loosely defined as the multitude of actions that maintain the U.S. global empire. Most Americans don’t realize the true political depth of imperialism — or don’t even know they live in the largest empire in world history, which adds urgency to the educating and organizing around this issue.

Some on the left would dismiss anti-imperialism as a “secondary” issue, accusing those who insist on its inclusion as “dogmatic” or “purist.” “Bernie is doing so many great things,” they insist, “that focusing on his weak points is counter-productive.”

It’s of course perfectly reasonable that many progressive/liberal and working class people would be attracted to Sanders’ platform. But socialists/revolutionaries must have a broader perspective. Imperialism is, in some ways, the beating heart of U.S. capitalism: a central power of the “billionaire class” that stops progress abroad while blocking progress at home.

The rabidly pro-imperialist section of the establishment is the most powerful and class-conscious section of the ruling class, with deep roots in the military industrial-complex. It also has deep, racist roots in the South, where military enlistees remain vastly over-represented, and where many military bases are named after pro-slavery civil war heroes. This is the most hideously reactionary section of the establishment, who’d be the first to support fascism domestically, since they’ve already supported it in various forms abroad.

The U.S. pro-imperialist establishment has helped to create a network of global military alliances that funnel weapons internationally, while cash flows globally into the hands of the 1% via free trade agreements crafted by the pro-imperialist establishment.

Without this imperialism the exports or markets of the largest U.S. corporations would suffer: including the big banks, big oil, big healthcare/insurance corporations, defense contractors (the arms industry), agro-corporations, tech firms, etc.

Bernie’s failure to confront this specific, crucial power of the “billionaire class” isn’t a “blind spot” of his politics, since imperialism is like a tank parked in your living room, too big to ignore. By consciously allying with this imperialist-section of the establishment, Sanders has exposed himself as a push over, whenever the imperialists decide its push comes to shove over war.

This imperialist pressure to “fall in line” extends beyond war. Sanders helped write and gave crucial political support to Obamacare, betraying his longstanding “dedication” to universal health care.

Sanders knew that Obamacare was not “a step in the right direction,” but a decision to spend all of Obama’s political capital on a scheme that strengthens the health care/pharmaceutical corporations that act as the biggest barrier to universal health care. If elected, President Sanders would abandon much of his campaign promises and “fall in line” as quickly and ingloriously as Obama did.

Sanders surely knows that foreign policy cannot be separated from domestic policy. They are two sides of the same coin that directly affect each other. What happens abroad affects what is possible domestically, and vice versa.

For example, the U.S. imperialist project — via “defense” spending —— drains the U.S. national budget (57% of discretionary spending), which could otherwise actually fund the things Bernie is proposing; universal health care and fully fund public schools, free college education, job creation, etc.

A Harvard study estimated that the full cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone will cost over $4 trillion, a number that is already increasing as the wars get indefinitely extended. This is a big reason why public schools are being shuttered and health insurance remains unaffordable or absent for tens of millions of people.

This kind of imperialist spending has effectively vetoed the job and social programs that people would enthusiastically vote for. This imperialist veto over domestic programs exemplifies how oppression abroad limits your freedoms at home. True freedom and economic security cannot be won in a bubble within an international economic system, especially within a U.S. imperialist system.

Imperialism also directly affects race relations in the United States. The U.S. establishment finds it acceptable to commit atrocities against people of color abroad because people of color at home live in dehumanized conditions and are treated as second-class citizens.

The imperialist actions abroad reinforce the oppression domestically, the most recent example being the Muslim people who are bombed overseas and then discriminated against at home. This racism is purposely exacerbated by politicians and the media, serving to reinforce the position of the establishment by dividing working class people in both affected nations.

The same dynamic is used in Africa, where the underlying racism against African Americans is projected abroad, aiding and abetting the regimes that committed the Rwandan and Congo genocide. These U.S.-supported atrocities are then blamed on the “inexplicably savage” behavior of African “tribalism”, a racist lie used to legitimize the racism, mass incarceration, job discrimination, and crushing poverty experienced by African Americans.

It’s no exaggeration to say that U.S. imperialism is the most politically reactionary force in the world, directly and deeply shaping governments and militaries/police across the world that then use these U.S.-made weapons against their own citizens.

For example, a recent article in Salon was named “35 Countries where the U.S. has supported Fascists, Drug Lords, and Terrorists.” The point is well made; U.S. imperialism artificially shoves governments across the globe far to the right, preventing these governments from becoming examples or allies for social movements within the United States.

The 700+ U.S. military bases across the globe directly affect the politics of every hosting nation, while U.S. imperialist political pressure is also applied via military alliances (NATO), arms sales, training military/police, supporting dictators, supporting military coups, proxy wars, direct military intervention, etc.

Supporting Bernie Sanders means ignoring — or minimizing — his imperialism, since political campaigns are won through cheerleading not criticism. And by ignoring Bernie’s foreign policy — because it might “hurt the campaign” — imperialism is reinforced through valuable political cover. The most powerful section of the U.S. establishment thus benefits.

Some Sanders supporters might respond; “at least his foreign policy is better than Hillary’s.” But Sanders himself has been unable to provide a real argument to support this claim during the ongoing debates.

When Sanders attempted to frame Hillary as “pro-regime change” in relation to the catastrophe she created in Libya, Hillary pointed out that Sanders voted “yes” to support that regime change. As the war machine rolled into Libya Sanders wasn’t a speed bump; he was a lubricant. Clinton and Sanders both have Libyan blood on their hands.

Sanders has Afghan blood on his hands too, having voted for the invasion of the now-endless Afghan war that triggered the beginning of the flurry of Middle East wars. And while Sanders brags about voting “no” for the 2003 Iraq war, his vote soon morphed into a “yes,” by his several votes for the ongoing funding of the war/occupation.

Sanders also voted “yes” for the U.S.-led NATO destruction of Yugoslavia, and supports the brutal Israeli military regime that uses U.S. weapons to slaughter Palestinians.

When it was announced that Obama was choosing sides and funneling guns to the Syrian rebels — thus exacerbating and artificially extending the conflict — Bernie was completely silent; a silence that helped destroy Syria and lead to the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

Sanders is consistently on the wrong side of history; he’s also been a direct accomplice to a series of massive war crimes.

Sanders often uses weak rhetoric to mitigate his imperialism. On his campaign website he says that the U.S. needs a “strong national defense infrastructure” and a “strong defense system,” but adds the caveat that he’s “concerned” about the military budget, and wants “accountability” for the enormous amounts that are spent. Obama the candidate spoke more clearly about war and peace than Sanders does.

Highlighting Sanders imperialism is especially important because the left has been repeatedly duped by imperialist wars in recent years, to the point that imperialism is becoming increasingly ignored, and consequently strengthened.

Large sections of the left were silent about the destruction of Yugoslavia, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria. They were blissfully ignorant of the ongoing imperialist adventures throughout Africa, most spectacularly in Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia and the Congo. The worst dictators in Africa — for example in Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda — are “good friends” of the United States.

By not giving adequate focus to the U.S. foreign military adventures, valuable political cover is given to allow these wars to continue. The U.S. anti-war movement was mostly silent about Obama’s imperialism while two historically important countries of the Middle East — Libya and Syria — were obliterated.

By not educating and organizing against imperialism, it’s impossible to make alliances with forces fighting imperialism abroad. Creating international alliances has a long tradition among the left among unions, Black liberation, and the socialist/communist movements.

There have also been powerful connections that helped curb apartheid South Africa, strengthen the Venezuelan revolution and empower Palestinians against the apartheid Israeli government.

However, the people on the ground in the Middle East who preferred that the U.S. not destroy their nations, have had little solidarity with people in the United States. In fact, the United States in many of their eyes is the number one enemy, which in turn makes them think that terrorism against U.S. citizens is justified.

Ultimately, the nationalist demands of the Sanders’ campaign cannot be achieved while simultaneously allowing international imperialism to thrive. Imperialism is a bogeyman that haunts social progress, re-appearing in countless forms to keep resources flowing endlessly into wars abroad that stunt domestic spending and distract from working class demands. A new military “crisis” will always strive to take priority over domestic considerations.

It’s obligatory for the left to challenge imperialism by any means necessary, waging campaigns and raising demands to stop foreign aggression.

By lowering our voices in response to Bernie’s campaign, an opportunity is missed to amplify our voices in strategic interventions such as the successful Black Lives Matter actions at Sanders’ rallies. Silence on these issues always benefits imperialism at the expense of everybody else.

Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) members are marked for elimination. Earlier attempts for peace collapsed in July. Open warfare followed – Ankara using tanks, artillery, warplanes, attack helicopters and thousands of combat troops in heavily populated areas. Civilians suffer most.

Cities and towns affected are trapped under virtual siege – without food, electricity, medical supplies and other essentials. Erdogan vowed to eliminate PKK members, freedom fighters wanting local autonomy or independence in Turkey’s southeast, wrongfully designated terrorists.

Erdogan minced no words saying “(y)ou will be annihilated in (your) houses, (your) buildings, (your) ditches which you have dug. Our security forces will continue this fight until it has been completely cleansed” – no matter the cost in human lives and suffering.

Trapped civilians say tanks and artillery fire all day long. They have nowhere to hide. They’re dying in their homes. Their schools, hospitals and vital infrastructure were destroyed. Kurdish areas resemble war-torn Syria and Iraq – endless devastating conflict with no relief.

Human Rights Watch Turkish researcher Emma Sinclair-Webb blasted what she called “ignor(ing) or cover(ing) up what’s happening” to Kurdish communities. Erdogan’s operation has “no limits. (There is) no law.”

One Kurdish citizen spoke for others, saying “(t)he east of the country is burning, and it feels like no one” notices or cares.

Western leaders able to intervene responsibly support their Turkish ally, a valued NATO member.

Turkey’s General Staff said hundreds of PKK members were killed since late December alone. Dargecit businesswoman Melek Gumus said her warehouses and everything inside were destroyed.

“(T)he whole district is like this,” she said.

“We were stuck at home for 20 days, and there was nothing to eat. It was torture for everybody.”

“We want freedom. We want peace. We don’t want them to be unfair to us.”

Turkish forces are destroying everything. Civilians are targeted like militants.

Snipers man rooftops. Anyone going out after curfew risks being shot. Thousands lost everything. People have no work, many without essentials to survive.

Over the weekend, hundreds of Berliners marched carrying signs and banners, saying: “Stop the war against the Kurdish people!” Protesters compared Erdogan’s ruling AKP party to ISIS.

Kurds are Turkey’s largest ethnic minority, representing up to 25% of the population, according to some estimates, ruthlessly treated for decades.

Earlier, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Ankara for committing high crimes against its Kurdish people since the Turkish state’s 1923 creation – including massacres, extrajudicial executions, torture, forced displacements, arbitrary arrests, ravaged towns and villages, as well as disappeared journalists and regime critics.

Erdogan pursues his own agenda while pretending to be combating ISIS in Syria and Iraq. He’s a major sponsor of terrorism, representing pure evil.

Selahattin Demirtas co-chairs the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party of Turkey (HDP) – founded in 2012, combining several left-wing groups – including supporters of equal rights for women and gays, secularists, anti-capitalists and environmentalists, putting it at odds with Erdogan’s agenda.

He accused HDP of fronting for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Last week, Ankara’s public prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into Demirtas, relating to his support for Kurdish self-determination in southeastern Turkey.

The Kurdish Democratic Society Congress (DTK) passed a resolution demanding local autonomy as the only way to resolve things responsibly.

“The rightful resistance mounted by our people against the policies that degrade the Kurdish problem, is essentially a demand and struggle for local self-governance and local democracy,” the resolution said.

Demirtas expressed support, saying “regional autonomy offers a very important opportunity for everyone in terms of living together” – putting him at direct odds with Erdogan’s agenda.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu accused him of “treason” for meeting with Sergey Lavrov in Moscow last month, publicly denouncing Turkey’s downing of a Russian bomber in Syrian airspace.

He forthrightly opposes Erdogan’s lawlessness, calling him and ruling party officials “murderers. Your hand is bloody. Blood has splattered from your face, your mouth to your nails and all over you. You are the biggest supporters of terror.”

Erdogan tolerates no opposition or critics, Demirtas a likely marked man. Perhaps he and his party officials are designated for elimination as part of Erdogan’s all-out war on Turkey’s Kurds.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

For the first time since the dissolution of the USSR and the restoration of capitalism in 1991, a strategic document of the Russian state has openly designated the United States and the NATO military alliance as threats to Russian national security.

The document, “About the Strategy of National Security of the Russian Federation,” was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on New Year’s Eve. It warns that Russia faces “counteraction from the USA and its allies, which are striving to retain their dominance in global affairs.” It predicts that this will lead to further “political, economic, military, and informational pressure” on Russia.

The document points in particular to actions NATO has taken since backing the February 2014 coup that installed a far-right, pro-Western regime in neighboring Ukraine. It cites the “intensification of military activities of [NATO] member countries,” the “further expansion of the alliance” into Eastern Europe along Russian borders, and “moving military infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders” as national security threats to Russia.

The publication of such a document is a warning that preparations for war between NATO and Russia, a nuclear-armed state, are well advanced. In diplomatic parlance, a national security threat is a threat so severe that a state is prepared to use military force to suppress it, and the strategy document states that Russia reserves the right to use military force if other measures to “protect national interests” are ineffective.

The Russian national security document amounts to an official recognition by the Russian state that its relations with NATO, and in particular with the United States, are in a state of collapse. The policies pursued by NATO over the last two years signify that war between NATO and Russia is a real possibility.

Since backing the coup in Kiev, NATO has supported the war pursued by the Ukrainian regime and allied far-right militias on Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine. Early last year, the US government proposed to openly arm the Kiev regime for war against separatist forces tacitly backed by Moscow. The current Russian national security document refers to Ukraine as a “long-term source of instability in Europe, and directly at the Russian border.”

This was part of a broad build-up of NATO military power threatening Russia. NATO posted thousands of troops and warplanes in the Baltic republics, only a few minutes by fighter flight from the Russian city of St Petersburg. It has sent troops, organized military exercises, and posted missile defense units across Eastern Europe, and deployed naval forces on missions or exercises from the Arctic to the Baltic.

The strategy document reportedly does not mention the Middle East, where NATO’s proxy war to oust Syria’s Russian-backed president, Bashar al-Assad, thus placed the Middle East and the entire world on the verge of all-out war. However, it is clearly a response to Turkey’s decision, endorsed by US President Barack Obama shortly afterwards, to shoot down a Russian jet last November over Syria, in a blatant act of war.

NATO is making even more dire threats, however. Washington in particular has shifted to open preparation of aggressive nuclear war against Russia. Last year, US officials testified before the Congress that US forces are preparing for possible preemptive “counterforce” strikes with nuclear weapons against military targets inside Russia, before any attack by Russia took place.

In its national security document, the Kremlin concludes that the NATO powers are seeking to overthrow the Russian government, on the model of “color revolutions” that produced US-backed regime change in countries like Georgia and Ukraine. It also warns that the NATO powers will seek to dissolve Russia. It lists “radical social groups which use nationalist and religious extremist ideologies, foreign and international NGOs, and also private citizens” among potential threats to Russian internal security and territorial integrity.

With the Kremlin fearing the worst, its national security document advocates a strategy of seeking to maintain good relations with the NATO powers, while relying on Russia’s military strength to deter NATO attacks. This includes above all maintaining Russia’s nuclear arsenal. The document stresses that Russia’s nuclear stockpile will be reduced only if this can be done “without damaging international security and strategic stability.”

The contents of the Russian national security strategy testify to the bankruptcy of the world capitalist system and amount to an indictment of the reckless policy of the imperialist powers. In an attempt to whip Moscow into line and assert their geostrategic interests in Eurasia, they are fueling a military escalation and an arms race that threatens to explode into a war that could claim millions or billions of lives.

The response of Putin and the Russian capitalist oligarchy that emerged from the dissolution of the USSR is however bankrupt and reactionary. They are both unable and unwilling to make any appeal to opposition to war in the international working class. Desperately trying to maintain relations with the imperialist powers and their financial and economic resources, they oscillate between trying to cut deals with the NATO countries and threatening to defend themselves by fighting a catastrophic war with them.

What emerges from the statements of the Kremlin and of Putin are the disastrous consequences of the dissolution of the USSR for Russia and the world. Surrounded by hostile NATO outposts in former Soviet republics in the Baltics, the Caucasus and Ukraine, devastated by the industrial and economic collapse that followed capitalist restoration in the USSR, Russia has been unable to rely on anti-imperialist solidarity that existed in the international working class with the USSR. The entire region has been thrown open to imperialist intervention, with catastrophic results.

The national security document itself points to the backward and parasitic character of Russian capitalism as a major national security threat. It bemoans Russia’s “lag in the development of advanced technologies, the vulnerability of the financial system, the imbalance of the budgetary system, the economy going offshore, the exhaustion of the raw materials base, the strength of the shadow economy, conditions leading to corruption and criminal activities, and uneven development of regions.”

All this makes it easier for the NATO powers to threaten Russia with financial sanctions, trade penalties, and the partition of the Russian Federation along regional or ethnic lines.

Above all, Russia is being confronted with the full brunt of the economic and geostrategic crisis of world imperialism. To the extent that the continued existence of the Russian state is emerging as an obstacle to the assertion of imperialist interests in the Middle East and Eurasia, it has become the target of ruthless military pressure from NATO.

Significantly, Putin made dire warnings about the rising danger of war between the major powers in his remarks last year to the Valdai Discussion Club.

According to Putin, “the world leaders of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and even 1980s did treat the use of armed force as an exceptional measure. In this sense, they behaved responsibly, weighing all the circumstances and possible consequences. The end of the Cold War put an end to ideological opposition, but the basis for arguments and geopolitical conflicts remained… In the past 25 years, the threshold for the use of force has gone down noticeably.”

He warned that as a result, “political, economic or military competition may get out of control.” He cited the dangers of “regional conflicts, especially in ‘border’ areas, where the interests of major nations or blocs meet,” and of “a new spiral of the arms race.” He attacked “the concept of the so-called disarming first strike [i.e., a preemptive US strike to destroy the Russian nuclear arsenal] including one with the use of high-precision long-range non-nuclear weapons comparable in their effect to nuclear weapons.”

Putin concluded that Russia’s nuclear arsenal would no longer deter other countries from attacking it, and seeking to advance their interests via global nuclear war. He declared, “The nuclear deterrent lost its value. Some probably even had the illusion that victory of one party in a world conflict was again possible—without irreversible, unacceptable, as experts say, consequences for the winner, if there ever is one.”